It's unclear how such egregiously bad images made it through peer-review.

Appall and scorn ripped through scientists’ social media networks Thursday as several egregiously bad AI-generated figures circulated from a peer-reviewed article recently published in a reputable journal. Those figures—which the authors acknowledge in the article’s text were made by Midjourney—are all uninterpretable. They contain gibberish text and, most strikingly, one includes an image of a rat with grotesquely large and bizarre genitals, as well as a text label of “dck.”

A dck pck, if you will.

Count me among the “some scientists online” who “questioned whether the text was also AI-generated”. I mean, it’s a disjointed mess. Right off, we get this:

The term “stem cell” was first coined in 1901 by Regaud

Um, no. But if that could be taken for human error, what about a sentence like this:

They were physically sheared and digested with a solution of DnaseI, hyaluronidase, collagenase, and trypsin using a two-step enzymatic digestion method in which the digestive enzymes included DnaseI, hyaluronidase, collagenase, and trypsin.

Just a bit before that, the text does a swerve into what sounds like a specific experiment, which doesn’t fit with its surroundings and is very strange in a review article. My guess is the whole thing was made by stitching together LLM responses.

The publisher, Frontiers Media, is not exactly held in high regard overall.

  • V0ldek@awful.systemsEnglish
    1·
    11 months ago

    According to researchers referenced in a 2015 blog post quoted by Allison and James Kaufman in the 2018 book Pseudoscience: The Conspiracy Against Science, “Frontiers has used an in-house journals management software that does not give reviewers the option to recommend the rejection of manuscripts” and the “system is setup to make it almost impossible to reject papers”. source

    Ah yes, pear reviw.

  • self@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    11 months ago

    A dck pck, if you will.

    I am so glad it wasn’t just my brain that went there

    I read an article about this on mastodon earlier, but somehow it seems like it took a long time for anyone to read the text of the paper and realize that’s garbage too

  • blakestacey@awful.systemsOPEnglish
    0·
    11 months ago

    And it’s been retracted:

    Following publication, concerns were raised regarding the nature of its AI-generated figures. The article does not meet the standards of editorial and scientific rigor for Frontiers in Cell and Development Biology; therefore, the article has been retracted.

    This retraction was approved by the Chief Executive Editor of Frontiers. Frontiers would like to thank the concerned readers who contacted us regarding the published article.

  • jonhendry@awful.systemsEnglish
    0·
    11 months ago

    To be fair though rodents can have pretty huge balls. Like dragging on the ground behind them huge.