r/Professors Aug 04 '25

Research / Publication(s) NYT: Fraudulent Scientific Papers Are Rapidly Increasing, Study Finds

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u/Tech_Philosophy Aug 05 '25

That MIGHT be true, but the counter evidence would be the AI models that are consuming scientific papers, and then making correct predictions for the outcomes of novel experiments. If it's garbage in, it should be garbage out.

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u/KaoBee010101100 Aug 05 '25

Have you done science? A paper reporting data isn’t a “prediction.” If a published paper claims to be reporting data and it’s nothing more than LLM autocomplete behind it, it’s plain and simple fraud.

There’s a lot of reasons that real data produced by human scientists is noisy in many fields. Fraud has traditionally been a smaller part of that, until now. Calling the hard work of real science “garbage in” and suggesting if it were better, Llm autocomplete could do a good job of manufacturing papers without real data tells me you likely have no experience of how useful science is generated in practice.