[Proziam]

If I steal hundreds of thousands of dollars (salary, plus research grants and other funds) and produce fake output, what do you think is appropriate?

To me, it's no different than stealing a car or tricking an old lady into handing over her fidelity account. You are stealing, and society says stealing is a criminal act.

[WarmWash]

We have a civil court system to handle stuff like this already.

[Proziam]

Stealing more than a few thousand dollars is a felony, and felonies are handled in criminal court, not civil.

EDIT - The threshold amount varies. Sometimes it's as low as a few hundred dollars. However, the point stands on its own, because there's no universe where the sum in question is in misdemeanor territory.

[WarmWash]

It would fall under the domain of contract law, because maybe the contract of the grant doesn't prohibit what the researcher did. The way to determine that would be in court - civil court.

Most institutions aren't very chill with grant money being misused, so we already don't need to burden then state with getting Johnny muncipal prosecutor to try and figure out if gamma crystallization imaging sources were incorrect.

[Proziam]

Fraud implies intent, either intent to deceive or intentionally negligent.

If you're taking public funds (directly or otherwise) with the intent to either:

A) Do little to no real work, and pass of the work of an AI as being your own work, or

B) Knowingly publish falsified data

Then you are, without a single shred of doubt, in criminal fraud territory. Further, the structural damage you inflict when you do the above is orders of magnitude greater than the initial fraud itself. That is a matter for civil courts ("Our company based on development on X fraudulent data, it cost us Y in damages").

Whether or not charges are pressed is going to happen way after all the internal reviews have demonstrated the person being charged has gone beyond the "honest mistake" threshold. It's like Walmart not bothering to call the cops until you're into felony territory, there's no point in doing so.

[wat10000]

We also have a criminal court system to handle stuff like this.

[WarmWash]

No we don't. I've never seen a private contract dispute go to criminal court, probably because it's a civil matter.

If they actually committed theft, well then that already is illegal too.

But right now, doing "shitty research" isn't illegal and it's unlikely it ever will be.

[wat10000]

The claim is that this would qualify as fraud, which is also illegal.

If you do a search for "contractor imprisoned for fraud" you'll find plenty of cases where a private contract dispute resulted in criminal convictions for people who took money and then didn't do the work.

I don't know if taking money and then merely pretending to do the research would rise to the level of criminal fraud, but it doesn't seem completely outlandish.