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by pcrh 656 days ago
This kind of fabricated result is not a problem for practitioners in the relevant fields, who can easily distinguish between false and real work.

If there are instances where the ability to make such distinctions is lost, it is most likely to be so because the content lacks novelty, i.e. it simply regurgitates known and established facts. In which case it is a pointless effort, even if it might inflate the supposed author's list of publications.

As to the integrity of researchers, this is a known issue. The temptation to fabricate data existed long before the latest innovations in AI, and is very easy to do in most fields, particularly in medicine or biosciences which constitute the bulk of irreproducible research. Policing this kind of behavior is not altered by GPT or similar.

The bigger problem, however, is when non-experts attempt to become informed and are unable to distinguish between plausible and implausible sources of information. This is already a problem even without AI, consider the debates over the origins of SARS-CoV2, for example. The solution to this is the cultivation and funding of sources of expertise, e.g. in Universities and similar.
1 comments
EnigmaFlare 656 days ago
Non-experts actually attempting to become informed (instead of just feeling like they're informed) can easily tell the difference too. The people being fooled are the ones who want to be fooled. They're looking for something to support their pre-existing belief. And for those people, they'll always find something they can convince themselves supports their belief, so I don't think it matters what false information is floating around.

It seems to be kind of a new thing for laymen to be reading scientific papers. 20 years ago, they just weren't accessible. You had to physically go to a local university library and work out how to use the arcane search tools, which wouldn't really find what you wanted anyway. And even then, you couldn't take it home and half the time you couldn't even photocopy it because you needed a student ID card to use the photocopier.

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