Google Scholar search: "certainly, here is" -chatgpt -llm

https://simonwillison.net/2024/Mar/15/certainly-here-is-google-scholar/

by wanderingmind • 2 years ago

194 94 2 years ago

tetris11• 2 years ago

Damming. What is research even becoming at this stage? I hope open peer review is the golden bullet here, since the paid journals are clearly struggling under the deluge of AI spam

TimTheTinker• 2 years ago

It's not that they're struggling, it's that by and large they don't care. They're making money from publishing scientific papers (or whatever they can be called), and that's all that matters.

qwertyuiop_2• 2 years ago

how does this model work ? the students and professors get paid by journals to publish papers?

bigyikes• 2 years ago

How can someone be intelligent enough to submit a research paper but stupid enough to fail at taking the most basic steps to hide their AI plagiarism?

What do we even do about something like this? Is there an organization that has the power to go through this list and blacklist each of the authors from future publications? Our society should have a zero tolerance policy for drivel like this. It cheapens the entire institution.

gordian-mind3• 2 years ago

Do you consider using ChatGPT to format a table in LateX plagiarism that should imply the end of your professional career?

TylerE• 2 years ago

Hell, better that they DO include the prompt. Since that A: clearly discloses AI usage and B: If someone attempts to duplicate the experiment (if relevant), they can take their data (perhaps give the prompt input, at least a subset showing all structure, in an appendix) and run it through the prompt.

muldvarp3• 2 years ago

I wouldn't call it plagiarism, but not even reading the output of the LLM before pasting it into your paper shows a lack of professionalism and indicates that the data in that table might as well be the hallucination of an LLM. Not exactly a good look.

Tubbe• 2 years ago

Crazy how broken the entire publication and review process is, that this stuff goes through without anyone noticing, and some even in well recognized journals.

brohee2• 2 years ago

It's basically organised crime. It's public money funding scientific publishing, and a huge part of the industry is just here to scam public money.

The industry is ripe for public prosecution when an article submitter didn't read it, an article reviewer didn't read it, neither did the publisher yet it is published in a journal with a subscription price in the thousands payed by publicly funded libraries.

esalman2• 2 years ago

So many students on every level of higher education, probably even starting from high school, are now using chat GPT. Does this make education a crime?

throw9988998899• 2 years ago

I know a guy who is currently on a higher technical school. He talks very open how he and all in his class use Chat GPT for all the bloat they have to write

admissionsguy2• 2 years ago

Students at universities do that now. And they get passed. It exposes the whole charade that much of the higher education has become.

The idea behind writing a lot has been that it forces students to think systematically and thereby learn. But they are not typically interested in that, they just need a diploma in order to get a job. Before computers they were copying books verbatim and since plagiarism software they paraphrase books. And now chatgpt removes the middle man - the student. It doesn’t make much sense either way. The source of the problem is really the conflation of higher learning with vocational training.

daghamm• 2 years ago

Yes, this does happen.

But a quick browsing shows that not all these papers contain that phrase and not all that do seem to be machine generated.

karencarits• 2 years ago

Indeed, you also get a considerable number of results when limiting the search to publications from before 2020

10c8• 2 years ago

If you actually take time to go and read through them, you can see that the writing pattern is clearly different to that of ChatGPT, contrary to the recent ones:

- "[...] Certainly here is a vast and important project for research."

Versus:

- "Certainly! Here is the text with spaces added after each word:"

rzzzt3• 2 years ago

First hit, in the keywords section (Ключевые слова): "methodology. Certainly / here is the English translation of the provided text"

Second hit: "Certainly! Here is a review of the literature on the carriage of goods under international commercial law:"

Third hit: "Certainly, here is the tabular representation of intraocular pressure (IOP) at 1 and 4 hours for Group X and Group Y:"

Fourth hit: "Certainly, here is a list of both Geo-natural and geosynthetic materials commonly used in civil engineering and environmental applications."

Fifth hit: "Certainly, here is a concise summary of the provided sections:"

baobabKoodaa7• 2 years ago

edit: I was wrong

ffpip• 2 years ago

Certainly, here is a reply to danhamm's comment to prove that he might be wrong.

I randomly picked 10 articles and all of them had the phrase in a manner that indicated it was directly pasted from ChatGPT.

baobabKoodaa7• 2 years ago

deleted

throwawayyy92372• 2 years ago

I don't have time to properly go through the entire list, of course, but the first paper that I've opened seemed to use ChatGPT to format a table of values, presumably not in tabular format originally. It didn't _seem_ like any of the ideas or conclusions were GPT-created.

I'm perfectly fine with this usage, although it is very sloppy if the authors and reviewers didn't pick the "certainly" in the final text.

pavel_lishin• 2 years ago

I'd be very wary of the LLM hallucinating a few number changes here and there, similar to what copies used to have a habit of doing: https://www.dkriesel.com/en/blog/2013/0802_xerox-workcentres...

throwawayyy92372• 2 years ago

Absolutely, the time saved formatting a table + time triple checking it might be the same as doing manually in the first place.

But I was talking about the intended usage, it doesn't sit as fraudulent to me in the scientific sense.

AlecSchueler• 2 years ago

You can ask it for code that will convert your input into tabulated output. Easier to check the logic of the code than all of the values in the table, then just plug your data into it.

croes• 2 years ago

But it shows a lack of care in the preparation of the paper

verticalscaler• 2 years ago

Very ironically this blog post is plagiarizing a tweet without credit. ;)

https://twitter.com/pmarca/status/1768405485705650309

easton• 2 years ago

The “via” link links a different tweet describing the same thing.

radarsat1• 2 years ago

Ironically? Are you saying that using an LLM to assist writing is plagiarism?

qwertyuiop_2• 2 years ago

empirically analyzing the origins of these papers most of them are from India.

tulio_ribeiro• 2 years ago

I'm fine with and approve the usage of LLMs in academia, as long as they provide genuine value and something new to the field. These tools should be embraced when they can augment human intellect.

However, I draw a firm line at using them to generate complete academic works or nonsensical content, as that undermines the integrity of research and renders it devoid of originality. LLMs should serve as invaluable assistants to free up scholars for higher-order analysis, not as replacements for human ingenuity.

regularfry• 2 years ago

The problem here is not necessarily the use of chatgpt at all. It's that academic idiom requires content-free linguistic noise for acceptance, and people are quite naturally turning to mechanistic routes to automate out the drudgery.

rich_sasha• 2 years ago

IMO academic papers are too long. The decorum dictates that a core of real, novel content must be surrounded in tons of fluff. Most people don't ever read that fluff (some do, and it's not totally useless, but not to most people).

It doesn't actually bother me if some of that fluff is ChatGPT-generated, provided the author actually read it and accepts the autogenerated content.

But better still, cut the fluff.

anal_reactor• 2 years ago

I'm having flashbacks from writing my Master's thesis. The experimental part was done in two weeks, then I spent a week describing the results, then a few months going from 15 pages to 80 pages and at least 30 citations, with the latter being surprisingly difficult because of uniqueness of my research topic.

CuriouslyC• 2 years ago

Buckle up, because we're not far away from autonomous research agents. It'll start with computational analysis, plot generation and creation of data discovery documents, but soon models will learn how to request simple physical experiments (sequencing some DNA, mass spec a sample, etc) and plan research based around the outcome.

fennecbutt2• 2 years ago

Which will be so amazing. But there is already ai running physical experiments: https://youtu.be/L1UgdoP2aeg

But it has been done for at lest a decade or so I think

rchaud• 2 years ago

You may as well say that you only want dynamite to be used for nonviolent purposes, like demolishing condemned buildings. It doesn't work that way, which is exactly what AI ethicists and researchers have been warning about - AI should be regulated, because once its in somebody's hands, you don't control how they use it, and the repercussions could be much wider than people imagine.

baobabKoodaa7• 2 years ago

deleted (I made a mistake when switching from the linked French Scholar to English version, I posted incorrect information here)

aredox• 2 years ago

Exactly. A correct analysis would be to determine the baseline pre-chatGPT, examine if there is a trend (some language "clichés" evolve with time) and then check if there is a clear shift post-ChatGPT.

gillesjacobs• 2 years ago

Yes exactly the whole claim is fundamentally flawed.

Better queries would include proper timeframing and all LLM-preference-tuning phrases from https://github.com/AlpinDale/gptslop

But even then, I don't think this is the gotcha OP thinks it is: LLM generation and summarizing is a legit tool in the paper writing process, especially for conclusions.

In my academic experience, the paper introduction and conclusion is often written last-minute, close to the submission deadline. While a good intro and conclusion are important for the reader, very little time is made available for it since researchers spend maximal time on expanding material findings and experiments. No wonder that assistive writing tools are used to speed things up. As long as proper post-editing and proof-reading is applied.

semanticist• 2 years ago

As long as proper post-editing and proof-reading is applied for course.

The whole point of the original article is that people aren't doing even that.

Plus in an academic context, it's important to acknowledge when parts of the paper are not your own work, especially in cases where the generated summary may not accurately reflect the actual paper. Saying that ChatGPT has been used to generate summaries would allow people to judge if the summary alone can be trusted to represent the content of the paper.

Jabbles2• 2 years ago

The link in the post is https://scholar.google.fr/scholar?hl=fr&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_ylo=...

Which already filters after 2023.

baobabKoodaa7• 2 years ago

Sorry, I made a mistake when I tried to switch from French Scholar to English

dougb54• 2 years ago

After late '22 I noticed a surge in superlatives like "vital", "essential", "crucial", and "pivotal" in essays and cover letters from students. ChatGPT uses words like these whenever you ask it to write an essay, and it's a dead giveaway. It's ruined the legitimate uses of the words.

Pick one of the Google Scholar results from the article and you'll find something awful like this (the start of the second paper): "The carriage of goods under international commercial law is a complex and essential aspect of international trade."

Sharlin2• 2 years ago

To be fair, replacing "important" with some less generic synonym is like one of the first tips in any Copy Editing for Dummies book, and definitely suggested by Grammarly, for example.

peter_vukovic• 2 years ago

Any word can become generic when overused. As more people get access to Grammarly and CharGPT, more of them will apply the same recommendations, turning previously rare words into generics.

nomonnai• 2 years ago

surge in superlatives like "vital", "essential", "crucial", and "pivotal"

This is very interesting. It could also be an effect of Grammarly, which suggests these replacements for the generic "important." Perhaps it's a combination of several effects.

dougb54• 2 years ago

My guess is that ChatGPT does it because RLHF rewards strongly stated opinions, because that's what humans prefer. It's a kind of "sycophantic behavior" that researchers have observed in these models (https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.13548)

chengiz• 2 years ago

You must be in some good writers' microcosm. A lot of human technical writers really write like that.

dougb54• 2 years ago

Heh, or maybe in some general sense, everything is essential, crucial, vital, constantly pivoting, etc., and these are the best words to use. Some day ChatGPT will tell me "I told you so!"

eynsham• 2 years ago

How are ‘vital’, ‘essential’ and ‘pivotal’ superlatives?

dougb54• 2 years ago

"Superlative" can mean not just the grammatical category that includes "*est" words, but also, more informally, adjectives that live at an extreme, as "critical" does within the concept of "importance".

yesco• 2 years ago

I've been interacting with ChatGPT and other LLMs so much I've already caught myself getting influenced by their word choice in the same way I might start subconsciously adopting the vocabulary of a friend. Food for thought .

whamlastxmas• 2 years ago

If I specifically tell ChatGPT to not use language like that it completely ignores my direction and does it anyway

noobcoder• 2 years ago

One of my close friends (Ivy League guy) did the same with his PhD thesis on Siamese networks in improving robotic perception. With the final presentation upcoming, in 2-3 days he's got a whole polished thesis ready to go and even convinced his guide that this was what he was working on it since 3 months. He was recently offered a doctorate

I wonder how many people adeptly use GPTs and manage to navigate through their academic landscapes nowadays. I bet its majority

admissionsguy2• 2 years ago

Hopefully this leads to a shorter communication form for presenting new results. No need for each paper to have a half-assed intro/review of the field. Since now even the authors skip that part.

Leave reviews for quality papers by top experts in the area.

perihelions• 2 years ago

The upside of all this is that professionals are communicating their points better. Lots of examples from non-English (-language) nationalities using LLM's to write exposition sections for English journals. This lowers the communications friction across the language barrier; and lowers the implicit bias and penalization when people read a (technically correct and useful) paper that has weak grammar, and is confusing to parse.

These aren't purely bad things! I wonder what future social conventions for this kind of thing will look like.

vitiral• 2 years ago

Perhaps two people can who don't fluently speak the same language can better communicate. But that's not really the bar is it? These are writing articles on behalf of fluent speakers for other fluent speakers to read. Is it improving THEIR "communication".

I'd say by definition the answer is no, since it's no longer humans communicating with each other at all.

esalman2• 2 years ago

The first paper I opened from this list has whole related work section copy-pasted from chat GPT response.

It implies that the authors did not care to thoroughly review related work. They basically didn't read any papers.

If you try to have a technical conversation with this sort of a person, they'll communicate their points out of their behind.

MarkSweep• 2 years ago

I agree that LLM can be used as a tool by non-native English speakers.

But the examples cited in the article are indefensible. The authors of the paper we either so care less they did not notice the the “certainly, here is…” preamble made no sense in a paper. Or they have such a poor grasp of English that they are unable to comprehend what they copy-pasted to notice. Either way this suggests that nothing in the paper can be relied upon.

DataDive• 2 years ago

When I looked at the examples, very few seemed to be fully ChatGPT generated.

That being said, most scientists are very smart and recognize the power of ChatGPT. They are most likely heavily relying on it when producing summaries, abstracts, hypotheses, etc., and because they can and will edit it you won't be able to tell from words alone.

ChatGPT is an equalizer between native English speakers and scientists speaking English as a second language.

But both groups will use it heavily and nobody can foresee what the net effect of it is on science.

Having had that experience, I can tell you that it takes weeks or months to write up results as a paper and go through the most boring steps of formatting and organizing them into antiquated presentation formats: Intro/Discussion/Results, dumbass citations, labeling, backward wordings ... etc

What should be a five-paragraph discovery on a blog has to take the form of a multipage, heavily formatted document that contains enormous, unrelated, and useless information.

With ChatGPT, you can do it in a day. If you are not using ChatGPT, you lose out.

colanderman2• 2 years ago

Fortunately we can also use ChatGPT to summarize this nonsense into the concise statement which should have been written in the first place.

Maybe even one day society will re-value conciseness and precision of thought over linguistic diarrhea.

fennecbutt2• 2 years ago

Welcome to academia

qarl2• 2 years ago

Even worse, I've seen evidence that many researchers will use a calculator rather than work out the math for themselves.

colanderman2• 2 years ago

If only reading LLM-generated bullshit didn't waste the reader's time!

qarl2• 2 years ago

I asked ChatGPT to consider your point:

Understandably, concerns about the quality of LLM-generated content are valid. However, it's crucial to recognize that academic research goes through rigorous processes before publication, including oversight by advisors and peer review. These layers of scrutiny help ensure that any content, whether initially drafted with the aid of AI like GPT-4 or not, meets the high standards of accuracy, reliability, and originality expected in scholarly work. AI tools are used as aids in the research process, not replacements for human intellect, and the responsibility for the final output always rests with the human authors. Hence, the academic community already has strong mechanisms in place to filter out inaccuracies or "bullshit," ensuring that the integrity of published research is maintained.

jordanpg• 2 years ago

Putting aside the well-known issues with academic publication that this problem highlights, another aspect of modern publications more generally that LLMs are going to disrupt is word bloat. Too many words.

For example, many academic papers are pages and pages of background, discussion, citations, etc. Very often the actual new material can fit on an index card + 1 figure. I understand why all the background is needed, in the abstract, but maybe this traditional way of thinking about incremental academic thought needs to shift in light of the reality of LLMs: LLMs will be used to write needless fluff. Indeed, it's what they're good at.

I'm a patent attorney and I can say that the same thing applies there. Patents are enormous documents filled with legalese, background, description, vague, conditional language, etc. There are good legal reasons for that, but again, often the actual novel invention can fit on an index card.

For that reason, it's self-evident to me that my job will be replaced, at least to some significant extent, by LLMs. But why not just cut out all the needless words? I could imagine patent law that added a "parsimony" requirement to patent filings. Examiners could reject filings that contained extraneous words. Then maybe patent lawyers would still be needed: to write the shortest possible patent that still contained the novelty.

This is just a toy thought experiment, not a serious proposal. My point is that LLMs expose as trivially bankrupt some aspects of academic and patent writing (and probably other places: marketing copy, some nonfiction essay-style writing, etc.).

Maybe LLMs will force us to embrace or even require brevity and conciseness to ensure that human beings stay in the loop.

lambdaba• 2 years ago

opened a random PDF from the search and it's full of misspellings (even the title is misspelled), they aren't using LLMs enough

qgin• 2 years ago

Big difference using LLM to wordsmith your English vs using LLM to fake your research and analysis

sorenjan• 2 years ago

Humans will use LLMs to produce long texts from a brief description, and then other humans will use LLMs to make a summary of that text. Maybe eventually we can make this communication more effective.

krastanov• 2 years ago

How many of these are in serious journals that actually are read by other scientists and how many of these are in low-quality predatory journals that simply help unsuccessful scientists inflate their publication numbers for a fee?

Looking at the search results, none of these are in "real" science journals. This is just yet another way in which predatory journals are terrible for science and academia (and its public perception), but the existence of garbage journals has been a problem for 2 decades (or more?).

On the bright side, productivity at respected institutions has not been significantly hampered by predatory journals. On the other hand, academia as a whole has obviously failed to teach incoming members that this is basically fraud (partially due to the publish-or-perish culture that is now even endorsed by governments).

pmarreck• 2 years ago

I don't see the issue with LLM paper assistance as long as the product is good

timkam• 2 years ago

Note that "false positives" may appear in the Google Scholar results for such queries. For example, a high-profile AI researcher shared a screenshot of https://scholar.google.com/scholar?as_sdt=0%2C5&as_ylo=2023&... (on X/Twitter: https://twitter.com/MelMitchell1/status/1768422636944499133). The second entry is an ironically written abstract of a talk and the author clearly (and consciously) plays with the cliché. Obviously, most of the fans of the person who shared the screenshot to thousands of followers will not notice this.

0823498723498722• 2 years ago

Is the adjacency in Scholar limited to intra-sentence fragments? It'd be problematic if not, certainly. Here is another example of the sibboleth: when we use "certainly" here. Is this a query hit?

mike_hearn• 2 years ago

Another source of similar entertainment is the problematic paper screener:

https://dbrech.irit.fr/pls/apex/f?p=9999:1::::::

It's a constant crawl of the literature that uses hand-written phrase detectors. Many of the phrases it looks for are caused by using spinners on plagiarised text, like this one:

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11042-024-18524-1

"At first, the input picture is transformed into the ruddy, green, and blue organize, and the clamor within the green band is evacuated using a median channel"

Here "noise" has been turned into "clamor". Nonsense text like this is easy to find in journals published by well known brands, in this case Springer Nature. A search for "profound learning" (deep learning) yields over 2000 results:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&as_ylo...

beginning_end• 2 years ago

Until this point in history there has been a reasonable correlation between the quality of writing and the "quality" of the underlying work in most text. If effort was put into the writing (and learning to write), that in itself used to be a decent indicator that effort and skill also was put into the data/ideas that the text conveyed.

That rule no longer works. People are still going to rely on it for a while though, and I'm worried it's going to break some stuff over the next few years.

0823498723498722• 2 years ago

With any luck the endpoint will be a world where texts are evaluated more on their semantics than their syntax.

empath-nirvana• 2 years ago

I think probably the solution here is to stop using publishing in peer reviewed journals as a job requirement for academics. Even before ChatGPT, academic publishing was already falling victim to Goodhart's law. Remove the perverse incentives and it should cut down on this by quite a lot.

2cynykyl• 2 years ago

Another way to look at the problem of LLM-generated garbage papers is that it doesn't actually change anything, because serious researchers in a given field already didn't trust work coming from unknown labs in shady journals. Researchers need to earn a reputation first by doing all the usual things like going to conferences (to build personal relationships), publishing reproducible results in real journals, making an actual impact on important problems, etc. Basically, LLM papers are just a new contribution to the already existing background noise.

geor9e• 2 years ago

Most of the first results have Cyrillic letters in the Author's name. I think these folks perhaps aren't fluent in English, and think "Certainly, here is a summary of…" is a normal thing people would say. They probably see it as a monologue flourish like "Secondly, here is a summary…", and don't realize it is actually a subservient conversational reply, a dead giveaway of an LLM chat.

Google Scholar search: "certainly, here is" -chatgpt -llm

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