Sounds like it could be a ‘tortured phrase’.
See here: arxiv.org/abs/2107.06751
But I can’t for the life of me figure out what it’s supposed to be.
Probabilistic text generators have been used to produce fake scientific papers for more than a decade. Such nonsensical papers are easily detected by both human and machine. Now more complex AI-powered generation techniques produce texts indistinguishable from that of humans and the generation of scientific texts from a few keywords has been documented. Our study introduces the concept of tortured phrases: unexpected weird phrases in lieu of established ones, such as 'counterfeit consciousness' instead of 'artificial intelligence.' We combed the literature for tortured phrases and study one reputable journal where these concentrated en masse. Hypothesising the use of advanced language models we ran a detector on the abstracts of recent articles of this journal and on several control sets. The pairwise comparisons reveal a concentration of abstracts flagged as 'synthetic' in the journal. We also highlight irregularities in its operation, such as abrupt changes in editorial timelines. We substantiate our call for investigation by analysing several individual dubious articles, stressing questionable features: tortured writing style, citation of non-existent literature, and unacknowledged image reuse. Surprisingly, some websites offer to rewrite texts for free, generating gobbledegook full of tortured phrases. We believe some authors used rewritten texts to pad their manuscripts. We wish to raise the awareness on publications containing such questionable AI-generated or rewritten texts that passed (poor) peer review. Deception with synthetic texts threatens the integrity of the scientific literature.
Something else to be aware of is compromised LinkedIn profiles. I was recently contacted by a very real looking profile on LinkedIn, who was supposedly recruiting for a very real position at a very real company that the profile actually worked for. Red flags were:
They wanted me to fill out a form with all my info., including SSN, and send photocopies of my ID. When I asked for an email address at the company in question to send everything to, they ghosted me.
Yikes, that one almost got me. Advice here is to always manually two ‘two factor’ identify people who contact you out of the blue.
Safe hunting folks.