Scientists aghast at bizarre AI rat with huge genitals in peer-reviewed article - awful.systems

> Appall and scorn ripped through scientists’ social media networks Thursday as several egregiously bad AI-generated figures circulated from a peer-reviewed article recently published in a reputable journal. Those figures—which the authors acknowledge in the article’s text were made by Midjourney—are all uninterpretable. They contain gibberish text and, most strikingly, one includes an image of a rat with grotesquely large and bizarre genitals, as well as a text label of “dck.” A dck pck, if you will. Count me among the “some scientists online” who “questioned whether the text was also AI-generated”. I mean, it’s a disjointed mess [https://scienceintegritydigest.files.wordpress.com/2024/02/fcell-11-1339390.pdf]. Right off, we get this: > The term “stem cell” was first coined in 1901 by Regaud Um, no [https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18371332/]. But if that could be taken for human error, what about a sentence like this: > They were physically sheared and digested with a solution of DnaseI, hyaluronidase, collagenase, and trypsin using a two-step enzymatic digestion method in which the digestive enzymes included DnaseI, hyaluronidase, collagenase, and trypsin. Just a bit before that, the text does a swerve into what sounds like a specific experiment, which doesn’t fit with its surroundings and is very strange in a review article. My guess is the whole thing was made by stitching together LLM responses. The publisher, Frontiers Media, is not exactly held in high regard overall [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontiers_Media#Controversies].