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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   2705 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 29, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

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Moral dilemma or obvious thing to do?

Hey Mottizens, lend me your ears, and your voices. I will keep this brief, but perhaps you can give your opinion (and tell me why). It's not Sunday anymore but maybe someone will read this.

I have recently submitted a book chapter for publication in what is to be an anthologized set of essays. Never you mind where or what, but this is an internationally recognized publishing house.

In an odd turn, after submission I received a paper of another author (to be in the same book, presumably) from the publisher to proof and review. Which is fine. I have no problem doing that.

I noticed there were a lot of non-smart quotes in the text. Some quotes were formatted properly, many weren't. This often happens when people paste material into a document with data that originated/was typed in another program (or on the internet). You see where I'm going with this, perhaps.

I decided to run the abstract through a ChatGPT detector. It was flagged as 51% chance written by AI. I ran the first paragraphs, and got the same result. It coded highest on "average sentence length" where the sentences did not vary in the same way a human's might.

I then ran my own first page, just as a counterfactual. My abstract alone also showed as 20% chance written by AI. But the first paragraphs showed 0% chance of AI authorship.

I don't think these systems are all that reliable, but it gave me pause. My question is should I:

1. ignore all of this, mention the smartquotes should be reformatted, revise as usual.

2. revise as usual, email the editors the above information.

3. stop revising, email the editors the above information.

4. other

I am leaning towards 1 simply because I am not convinced the AI detector is all that accurate, and also the author is not a native-speaker of English (though is pretty damn good). Maybe the author put it into Chat GPT and said "Make this sound academic" or something. And at the end of the day I am not sure how serious "generate by AI" is, whether it suggests a kind of academic fraud or is simply a tool put to use. It isn't clear.

What say you?

Note: This post was human-generated.

Another source of mixed quotes would be indiscriminate copy-pasting from human-generated documents -- did you try any more traditional plagarism detection tools?

I didn't. I only know of programs using databases suited to, say, undergraduate essays, and not this kind of research writing. The sentences don't seem the type of writing one would paste from someone else, much more something an AI would generate.

I guess if the writing is OK (by the standards of ESL academic literature) maybe I'm with ace and it's not so different from the guy hiring a translator or something. Unless ChatGPT is capable of hallucinating a whole paper by itself, which hopefully people would pick up on? (that may be field dependent, scarily enough)

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