A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
When I was in grad school I mentioned to the department chair that I frequently saw a mis-citation for an important paper in the field. He laughed and said he was responsible for it. He made an error in the 1980s and people copied his citation from the bibliography. He said it was a good guide to people who cited papers without reading them.
At university, I faked a paper on economics (not actually my branch of study, but easily to fake) and put it on the shelf in their library. It was filled with nonsense formulas that, if one took the time and actually solved the equations properly, would all produce the same number as a result: 19920401 (year of publication, April Fools Day). I actually got two requests from people who wanted to use my paper as a basis for their thesis.
Congratulations! You are now a practicing economist. This is exactly how that field works.
Another basic demonstration on why oversight by a human brain is necessary.
A system rooted in pattern recognition that cannot recognize the basic two column format of published and printed research papers
To be fair the human brain is a pattern recognition system. it’s just the AI developed thus far is shit
The human brain has a pattern recognition system. It is not just a pattern recognition system.
The LLM systems are pattern recognition without any logic or awareness is the issue. It's pure pattern recognition, so it can easily find some patterns that aren't desired.
Guys, can we please call it LLM and not a vague advertising term that changes its meaning on a whim?
Wouldn't it be OCR in this case? At least the scanning?
Yes, but the LLM does the writing. Someone probably carelessly copy pasta'd some text from OCR.
Fair enough, though another possibility I see is that the automated training process for LLMs used OCR for those papers (Or an already existing text version in the internet was using bad OCR) and those papers with the mashed word were written partially or fully by an LLM.
Either way, the blanket term "AI" sucks and it's honestly getting kind of annoying. Same with how much LLMs are used.
Scientists who write their papers with an LLM should get a lifetime ban from publishing papers.
BuT tHE HuMAn BrAin Is A cOmpUteEr.
Edit: people who say this are vegetative lifeforms.
Vegetative electron microscopes!
I played around with ChatGTP to see if it could actually improve my writing. (I've been writing for decades.)
I was immediately impressed by how "personable" the things are and able to interpret your writing and it's able to detect subtle things you are trying to convey, so that part was interesting. I also was impressed by how good it is at improving grammar and helping "join" passages, themes and plot-points, it has advantages that it can see the entire writing piece simultaneously and can make broad edits to the story-flow and that could potentially save a writers days or weeks of re-writing.
Now that the good is out of the way, I also tried to see how well it could just write. Using my prompts and writing style, scenes that I arranged for it to describe. And I can safely say that we have created the ultimate "Averaging Machine."
By definition LLM's are designed to always find the most probable answers to queries, so this makes sense. It has consumed and distilled vast sums of human knowledge and writing but doesn't use that material to synthesize or find inspiration, or what humans do which is take existing ideas and build upon them. No, what it does is always finds the most average path. And as a result, the writing is supremely average. It's so plain and unexciting to read it's actually impressive.
All of this is fine, it's still something new we didn't have a few years ago, neat, right? Well my worry is that as more and more people use this, more and more people are going to be exposed to this "averaging" tool and it will influence their writing, and we are going to see a whole generation of writers who write the most cardboard, stilted, generic works we've ever seen.
And I am saying this from experience. I was there when people started first using the internet to roleplay, making characters and scenes and free-form writing as groups. It was wildly fun, but most of the people involved were not writers, but many discovered literation for the first time there, it's what led to a sharp increase in book-reading and suddenly there were giant bookstores like Barns & Noble popping up on every corner. They were kids just doing their best, but that charming, terrible narration became a social standard. It's why there are so many atrocious dialogue scenes in shows and movies lately, I can draw a straight line to where kids learned to write in the 90's. And what's coming next is going to harm human creativity and inspiration in ways I can't even predict.
I am a young person who doesn't read recreationally, and I avoid writing wherever I can. Thank you for sharing your insight as well as sparking an interesting discussion in this thread.
Reading is incredibly important for mental development, it teaches your brain how to have the language tools to create abstractions of the world around you and then use those abstractions to change perspectives, communicate ideas and understand your own thoughts and feelings.
It's never too late to start exercising that muscle, and it really is a muscle, a lot of people have a hard time getting started reading later in life because they simply don't have the practice in forming words into images and scenes.... but think about how strong that makes your brain when you can form text into whole vivid worlds, when you can create images and people and words and situations in your mind to explore the universe around you and invent simulated situations with more accuracy... I cannot scream enough how critically important it is for us to exercise this muscle, I hope you keep looking for things that spark your interest just enough that you get a foothold in reading and writing :)
Yup, it's something I myself recently started to realise and have been forcing myself to read things that actually interest me.
While in elementary and middle school every 2 months we had a specific book we had to read and then would discuss it in class and would be graded based on our input.
Reading books and writing essays has been cemented in my mind as a boring chore that is forced upon me. It took years before it even occured to me that reading might be a fun activity, and a couple more before I actively started trying to read again. It's difficult to break away from the mould I've been set to during my childhood, but I'm slowly chipping away at it.
Children SHOULD read, but how can we get them to WANT to read?
It immediately demonstrates a lack of both care and understanding of the scientific process.
I recently reviewed a paper, for a prestigious journal. Paper was clearly from the academic mill. It was horrible. They had a small experimental engine, and they wrote 10 papers about it. Results were all normalized and relative, key test conditions not even mentioned, all described in general terms.. and I couldn't even be sure if the authors were real (korean authors, names are all Park, Kim and Lee). I hate where we arrived in scientific publishing.
Do you usually get to see the names of the authors you are reviewing papers of in a prestigious journal?
I try to avoid reviews, but the editor is a close friend of mine and i'm an expert of the topic. The manuscript was only missing the date
It is worthwhile to note that the enzyme did not attack Norris of Leeds university, that would be tragic.
Wait how did this lead to 20 papers containing the term? Did all 20 have these two words line up this way? Or something else?
AI consumed the original paper, interpreted it as a single combined term, and regurgitated it for researchers too lazy to write their own papers.
Hot take: this behavior should get you blacklisted from contributing to any peer-reviewed journal for life. That's repugnant.
The peer review process should have caught this, so I would assume these scientific articles aren't published in any worthwhile journals.
One of them was in Springer Nature’s Environmental Science and Pollution Research, but it has since been retracted.
The other journals seem less impactful (I cannot truly judge the merit of journals spanning several research fields)
The most disappointing timeline.
I think you can use vegetative electron microscopy to detect the quantic social engineering of diatomic algae.