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- Hacker News
- Tortured phrases, clear signs of fraud or plagiarism: https://theconversation.com/problematic-paper-screener-trawl...by bjourne
- This should be the top comment. Thousands of retracted papers? More informative than just a Google Scholar search.by fn-mote
- In the spring semester this year my teacher friends said they were getting a lot of student work that was unusually well written compared to the student’s other work, but also contain unnatural typos throughout.
The students were using ChatGPT and thought they would trick the teacher by editing some typos in before submission.
The cheating market is moving fast. There are now tools you can use to rephrase LLM generated output until the Pangram score drops low enough.
Versions of this cat and mouse game have been going on for a long time. Before ChatGPT was a household name there was a market for simple paraphrasing tools that spammers would use to send variations of email text to try to delay pattern matching spam filters.
by Aurornis - Cheating detection technology will be a cat and mouse game, but a good teacher who knows his students will spot cheating almost immediately (proving it might be more difficult).
The only solution is to evaluate students in ways that they can't cheat. Hand-written exams in class, oral exams, etc. but that is quite time-consuming and most teachers at least in K-12 are already overloaded.
by SoftTalker - Kind of reminds me of the neutered newspeak where people now choose to use words like "unalive" instead of "kill"by thegrim33
- I learned from Jeopardy! that this is called algospeak: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Algospeakby pattilupone
- And there's more. In political science: "average voter theorem", which turns out at least some plagiarism https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22a...
In statistics: "tendency score matching" https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22t...
by dash2 - It seems like, particularly in scholarly works, we should cite AI contributions the same way we cite a third party, with similar consequences around plagiarism. If you’re copying AI whole hog, not quoting and citing it, and not catching basic failures. Is it really “your” work?by mikgp
- Under "related searches" it suggests "kidney dissatisfaction", and indeed:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C38&q=%22...
by j2kun - It's actually pretty funny to look for such synonym expressions https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22h... turns up a few more. If you want to read more, I believe those are called "tortured phrases"by lkm0
- From 2021: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.06751
And SCIgen was generating bullshit papers that actually managed to be published in 2005: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCIgen
- Well, yes, and I call them 'distressed phrases'by kaddar
- > "Tortured phrases" are bizarre, nonsensical word combinations—such as "counterfeit consciousness" instead of "artificial intelligence"
Conterfeit Consciousness is gonna be the name of my new post-liquid analog modular synth IDM project.
I feel like these text spinners could actually be an untapped gold mine for creatively naming things.
by kortex - "Kidney transplantation is a surgery to eliminate a sound, working kidney from a living or cerebrum dead giver and embed it into a patient with non-working kidneys. Kidney transplantation is performed on patients with persistent kidney disappointment, or end-stage renal illness (ESRD). ESRD happens when a sickness or confusion harms the kidneys with the goal that they are presently not able to do satisfactorily eliminating liquids and squanders from the body or of keeping up with the legitimate level of specific kidney-directed synthetics in the circulatory system. Without long haul dialysis or a kidney relocate, ESRD is deadly."
https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Handbook-of-Kidney...
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=kidney+disappo...
Wolters Kluwer seems to be a real multinational company?
by lq9AJ8yrfs - > Wolters Kluwer seems to be a real multinational company?
Funnily enough, your first link reports that the author of the book is "Kluwer, Wolters".
Being a real multinational company doesn't mean they've read the books published under their imprint.
by thaumasiotes - I hope the synopsis is the only thing that got mangled by the thesaurus bot...by elric
- I wonder if anyone else felt a somewhat "late 19th/early 20th-century" style in that paragraph; "sickness or confusion" and "liquids and squanders" stood out in particular.by userbinator
- This is a really confusing one, since neither the "AI generated paper" nor "translation issue" explanations hold.
I found [1], created all the way back in 2021, which seems to first introduce this "kidney disappointment" term, and I would have to assume that perhaps the authors preferred to translate it from their native language.
LLMs did not exist in their current form in 2021, so couldn't have used it to write down a coherent thought, let alone a paper, at the time.
At the same time, I do live in the same country as the authors, and while we don't speak the best English, being a student at a college without some familiarity of the English language to come up with the term "kidney disappointment" is, let's just say, hard to believe for me.
Edit: This other comment[2] made me realize what it might have been: plagiarism avoidance.
Unfortunately, many colleges here do not have the best reputation and often run like degree mills, and the aforementioned comment made me remember a conversation with a friend, who mentioned writing a review paper.
Again, LLMs were not really a thing at the time, so they mentioned how they had to run their paper through a plagiarism detection tool, and then they substituted words with their synonyms. I guess someone really did search for the word "failure" and found "disappointment" as an alternative.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Suprodip-Mandal/publica...
- Never heard of a content spinner?
- I wonder if something similar is happening, except people are using AI detection tools and then substituting words.by RobotToaster
- Google Translate has existed since way back then. I remember seeing hilarious posts about bizarre translations from Chinese and other languages in the 2010s.by tha_hnrain
- Perhaps the authors might have originally been going for "rejection" (of transplant) which then got translated into "disappointment".by ssivark
- Could it just be neural translation? It existed since the mid 2010s.by bhouston
- LLMs were not available in 2021, but "Google translate" is much older.
Such translations were not unusual.
Around 2017 to 2019 I used a lot "Google translate", because it saved time despite its flaws, but there never was even a single sentence that I could let exactly as generated by "Google translate".
In each sentence I had to change at least a word or two, and many were hilarious. This was for translations between English and German. I assume that for other more distant languages the translations must have been much worse.
by adrian_b - It fits the "naive deplagiarization" explanation perfectly, however. Many of them are pre-LLM, when people had to plagiarize things the good old-fashioned way, and subsequently hide that fact via synonym replacement.by Retr0id
- Most of these are authored by what appear to be non-native English speakers. So, the most likely explanation is a translation issue.
In engineering literature from Russia from the 1960s, one sometimes finds references to a ‘water goat’ in papers that are otherwise about heavy machinery. It turns out this is a twice-translated rendition of ‘hydraulic ram’.
by avalys - All your base are belong to us.by stymaar
- Hey, it's not that easy to chose between "водяной баран" and "гидравлический таран", you know.
My favourite example of troubled blind translation is still "naked conductor runs under the carriage".
by Joker_vD - The classic example of this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_She_Is_Spoke
> It is widely believed that Carolino could not speak English and that an unknown French–English dictionary was used to translate the earlier Portuguese–French phrase book O novo guia da conversação em francês e português, written by José da Fonseca.
It became so popular for comedic reasons in the English-speaking world that it was reprinted many times and reviewed by Mark Twain.
by tdeck - > engineering literature from Russia from the 1960s, one sometimes finds references to a ‘water goat’
Oh, that's where it comes from!
My dad told me something close when I was a kid, but according to him it was the early EU doing dictionary translation between English and French and getting "water sheep". I never could find it.
Through an unrelated anecdote, in my head this is now bound to the music of "smoke on the water", with a sheep impression for the guitar (bass?) — "Sheep on the water, ba baa baaah, ba ba ba baaah"
by ben_w