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Slow news day? Guess I'll ramble for a bit.
Scientists shamelessly copy and paste ChatGPT output into a peer-reviewed journal article, like seriously they're not even subtle about it:
This is far from an isolated incident - a simple search of Google Scholar for the string "certainly, here is" returns many results. And that certainly isn't going to catch all the papers that have been LLM'd.
This raises the obvious question as to why I would bother reading your paper in the first place if non-trivial sections of it were written by an LLM. How can I trust that the rest of it wasn't written by an LLM? Why don't I cut out the middle man and just ask ChatGPT directly what it thinks about lithium-metal batteries and three-dimensional porous mesh structures?
All this fresh on the heels of youtube announcing that creators must now flag AI generated content in cases where omitting the label could be viewed as deceptive, because "it would be a shame if we (youtube) weren't in compliance with the new EU AI regulations", to which the collective response on Hacker News was "lmao okay, fair point. It would be a shame if we just lied about it."
It would be very boring to talk about how this represents a terminal decline in standards and the fall of the West, and how back in my day things were better and people actually took pride in their work, and how this is probably all part of the same vast conspiracy that's causing DEI and worse service at restaurants and $30 burgers at Five Guy's. Well of course people are going to be lazy and incompetent if you give them the opportunity. I'm lazy and incompetent too. I know what it feels like from the inside.
A more interesting theoretical question would be: are people always lazy and incompetent at the same rate, across all times and places? Or is it possible to organize society and culture in such a way that people are less likely to reach for the lazy option of copy and pasting ChatGPT output into their peer-reviewed journal articles; either because structural incentives are no longer aligned that way, or because it offends their own internal sense of moral decency.
You're always going to have a large swath of people below the true Platonic ideal of a 100 IQ individual, save large scale genetic engineering. That's just how it goes. Laziness I'm not so sure about - it seems like it might be easier to find historical examples of it varying drastically across cultures. Like, the whole idea of the American Revolution is always something that blew my mind. Was it really all about taxes? That sounds like the very-slightly-true sort of myth they teach you in elementary school that turns out to be not-actually-true-at-all. Do we have any historians who can comment? Because if it was all about taxes, then isn't that really wild? Imagine having such a stick up your ass about tax hikes that you start a whole damn revolution over it. Those were not "lazy" men, that's for sure. That seems like the sort of thing that could only be explained if the population had vastly different genetics compared to contemporary America, or a vastly different culture; unless there are "material conditions" that I'm simply not appreciating here.
Speaking of material conditions, Brian Leiter recently posted this:
Marx's view, as far as I can tell, was that ideas (including cultural values and moral guidelines) should be viewed as casually inert epiphenomena of the physical material and economic processes that were actually the driving forces behind social change. I don't know where he actually argues for this in his vast corpus, and I've never heard a Marxist articulate a convincing argument for it - it seems like they might just be assuming it (but if anyone does have a citation for it in Marx I would appreciate it!).
If Marx is right then the project of trying to reshape culture so as to make people less likely to copy and paste ChatGPT output into their peer-reviewed journal articles (I keep repeating the whole phrase to really drive it home) would flounder, because we would be improperly ascribing the cause of the behavior to abstract ideas when we should be ascribing it to material conditions. Which then raises the question of what material conditions make people accepting of AI output in the first place, and how those conditions might be different.
Top-level LLM poasting. You have my seal of approval.
IQ scored are renormalized regularly, so in a society that did do that, the median IQ would be 100 again (though they would be far higher on previous scales, this is a minor nitpick, I'm in the mood for those)
One obvious answer would be that the LLMs have become good enough that accepting their output, in a research setting, actually does achieve the objective of creating and promulgating useful knowledge.
I don't think we're there quite yet, but it's a sign we're close if so many are leaking through the cracks in the hallowed peer review process. You almost certainly couldn't achieve that with GPT-2, it would be too incoherent, unless you went with absolute bottom-barrel pay to publish journals, whereas they're cropping up in modestly respectable ones and even the odd prestigious journal.
People, including scientists, have always been lazy to some degree. That usually manifested as having grad students or even undergrads doing the grunt work. Now we've got new avenues.
Besides, as far as I'm concerned, we're only a few years away from LLMs doing "legitimate" research, and then becoming outright superhuman. This is just a transitional stage to get there, we have to deal with ersatz good enough to fool checked out reviewers section for only a bit longer. And soon enough we'll have the journals using AI themselves to notice and filter out the crap.
I think these cases demonstrate the "peer review process" is not and was not working very well in the first place, and to the extent it was working, it was because of the remaining scraps of integrity among people writing and submitting manuscripts. Thus the reviewers didn't have to do much serious reviewing, like reading all of the manuscript and thinking about it.
I agree peer review is a flawed idea applied terribly.
The incentive structure simply makes no sense. Busy academics are expected to do a great deal of work and cognitive effort in return for little to no recognition or recompense. It's a testament to natural honesty that it sometimes works even in a subpar manner.
Unless you actively incentivize things like performing replications, it's all for naught. We wouldn't have a replication crisis in the softer sciences if that wasn't the case. At least it's more obvious in the harder ones when something plainly does not work.
It needs to be torn down and rebuilt, but easier said than done for such a loadbearing structure in Science™.
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