A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
Rules
This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
When I was in grad school I mentioned to the department chair that I frequently saw a mis-citation for an important paper in the field. He laughed and said he was responsible for it. He made an error in the 1980s and people copied his citation from the bibliography. He said it was a good guide to people who cited papers without reading them.
At university, I faked a paper on economics (not actually my branch of study, but easily to fake) and put it on the shelf in their library. It was filled with nonsense formulas that, if one took the time and actually solved the equations properly, would all produce the same number as a result: 19920401 (year of publication, April Fools Day). I actually got two requests from people who wanted to use my paper as a basis for their thesis.
Congratulations! You are now a practicing economist. This is exactly how that field works.
Another basic demonstration on why oversight by a human brain is necessary.
A system rooted in pattern recognition that cannot recognize the basic two column format of published and printed research papers
To be fair the human brain is a pattern recognition system. it’s just the AI developed thus far is shit
The human brain has a pattern recognition system. It is not just a pattern recognition system.
The LLM systems are pattern recognition without any logic or awareness is the issue. It's pure pattern recognition, so it can easily find some patterns that aren't desired.
Guys, can we please call it LLM and not a vague advertising term that changes its meaning on a whim?
For some weird reason, I don't see AI amp modelling being advertised despite neural amp modellers exist. However, the very technology that was supposed to replace the guitarists (Suno, etc) are marketed as AI.
Scientists who write their papers with an LLM should get a lifetime ban from publishing papers.
BuT tHE HuMAn BrAin Is A cOmpUteEr.
Edit: people who say this are vegetative lifeforms.
Vegetative electron microscopes!
I played around with ChatGTP to see if it could actually improve my writing. (I've been writing for decades.)
I was immediately impressed by how "personable" the things are and able to interpret your writing and it's able to detect subtle things you are trying to convey, so that part was interesting. I also was impressed by how good it is at improving grammar and helping "join" passages, themes and plot-points, it has advantages that it can see the entire writing piece simultaneously and can make broad edits to the story-flow and that could potentially save a writers days or weeks of re-writing.
Now that the good is out of the way, I also tried to see how well it could just write. Using my prompts and writing style, scenes that I arranged for it to describe. And I can safely say that we have created the ultimate "Averaging Machine."
By definition LLM's are designed to always find the most probable answers to queries, so this makes sense. It has consumed and distilled vast sums of human knowledge and writing but doesn't use that material to synthesize or find inspiration, or what humans do which is take existing ideas and build upon them. No, what it does is always finds the most average path. And as a result, the writing is supremely average. It's so plain and unexciting to read it's actually impressive.
All of this is fine, it's still something new we didn't have a few years ago, neat, right? Well my worry is that as more and more people use this, more and more people are going to be exposed to this "averaging" tool and it will influence their writing, and we are going to see a whole generation of writers who write the most cardboard, stilted, generic works we've ever seen.
And I am saying this from experience. I was there when people started first using the internet to roleplay, making characters and scenes and free-form writing as groups. It was wildly fun, but most of the people involved were not writers, but many discovered literation for the first time there, it's what led to a sharp increase in book-reading and suddenly there were giant bookstores like Barns & Noble popping up on every corner. They were kids just doing their best, but that charming, terrible narration became a social standard. It's why there are so many atrocious dialogue scenes in shows and movies lately, I can draw a straight line to where kids learned to write in the 90's. And what's coming next is going to harm human creativity and inspiration in ways I can't even predict.
I can confirm that a lot of student's writing have become "averaged" and it seems to have gotten worse this semester. I am not talking about students who clearly used an AI tool, but just by proximity or osmosis writing feels "cardboardy". Devoid of passions or human mistakes.
It immediately demonstrates a lack of both care and understanding of the scientific process.
I recently reviewed a paper, for a prestigious journal. Paper was clearly from the academic mill. It was horrible. They had a small experimental engine, and they wrote 10 papers about it. Results were all normalized and relative, key test conditions not even mentioned, all described in general terms.. and I couldn't even be sure if the authors were real (korean authors, names are all Park, Kim and Lee). I hate where we arrived in scientific publishing.
To be fair, scientific publishing has been terrible for years, a deeply flawed system at multiple levels. Maybe this is the push it needs to reevaluate itself into something better.
And to be even fairer, scientific reviewing hasn't been better. Back in my PhD days, I got a paper rejected from a prestigious conference for being too simple and too complex from two different reviewers. The reviewer that argue "too simple" also gave a an example of a task that couldn't be achieved which was clearly achievable.
Goes without saying, I'm not in academia anymore.
People shit on Hossenfelder but she has a point. Academia partially brought this on themselves.
It is worthwhile to note that the enzyme did not attack Norris of Leeds university, that would be tragic.
Wait how did this lead to 20 papers containing the term? Did all 20 have these two words line up this way? Or something else?
AI consumed the original paper, interpreted it as a single combined term, and regurgitated it for researchers too lazy to write their own papers.
Hot take: this behavior should get you blacklisted from contributing to any peer-reviewed journal for life. That's repugnant.
I don't think it's even a hot take
It's a hot take, but it's also objectively the correct opinion
Unfortunately, the former is rather what should be the case, although so many times it is not:-(.
Yeah, this is a hot take: I think it’s totally fine if researchers who have done their studies and collected their data want to use AI as a language tool to bolster their paper. Some researchers legitimately have a hard time communicating, or English is a second language, and would benefit from a pass through AI enhancement, or as a translation tool if they’re more comfortable writing in their native language. However, I am not in favor of submitting it without review of every single word, or using it to synthesize new concepts / farm citations. That’s not research because anybody can do it.
It is also a somehow hot take because it kinda puts the burden of systemic misconfiguration on individuals shoulders (oh hey we've seen this before, after and all the time, hashtag (neo)liberalism).
I agree people who did that fucked up. But having your existence as an academic, your job, maybe the only thing you're good at rely on publishing a ton of papers no matter what should be taken into account.
This is a huge problem for science not just since LLM's.
The peer review process should have caught this, so I would assume these scientific articles aren't published in any worthwhile journals.
One of them was in Springer Nature’s Environmental Science and Pollution Research, but it has since been retracted.
The other journals seem less impactful (I cannot truly judge the merit of journals spanning several research fields)
The most disappointing timeline.
I think you can use vegetative electron microscopy to detect the quantic social engineering of diatomic algae.
My lab doesn't have a retro encabulator for that yet, unfortunately. 😮💨
It is by no spores either
"Science" under capitalism.
https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/paul-avrich-what-is-makhaevism
I thought vegetative electron microscopy was one of the most important procedures in the development of the Rockwell retro encabulator?
Thank you for highlighting the important part 🙏