A Fake Paper in 20 Minutes
A commercial offering lets anyone make a fake science paper over lunch
Tuesday’s podcast episode was about how technology-inspired and money-grubbing billionaires and their lackeys are warping the scientific enterprise in order to make it more likely to generate investment returns.
To do this, one particular group at the aptly named insilico.com created a tool for generating papers using LLMs and so forth called Science42: DORA.
- Given the predilection for references to fantasy and science fiction classics in this group — Peter Thiel is notorious for bastardizing names from the Lord of the Rings, much of the AI baloney is based on a heartless path to some Star Trek fantasy — I believe the use of “42” here out of the blue is a reference to “the answer to life, the universe, and everything” from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
In any event, because it seems important for everyone to appreciate what kind of tools paper mills and others have been using, and that these tools are now becoming commercially available for anyone to use, I wanted to repost the quick video I made, complete with massive guitar riffage as a sonic backdrop.
Overall, the paper took 20 minutes to create based simply on one prompt concept — “music and mental health.”
The paper claims that assessments of stress and moods were completed, salivary cortisol and alpha-amylase levels were measured, various vitals were taken, that a cognitive and emotional assessment was completed, and that a statistical analysis using SPSS version X was conducted.
None of these things happened, yet the LLM writes:
A major strength of our study is its methodological breadth, encompassing a wide range of intervention formats, participant demographics, and outcome domains, which enhances the generalizability and relevance of our findings.
The LLM also included 119 references. I have not validated any of them.
Again, one three-word prompt got me an ~15,000-word paper with 119 references making claims about things that never happened all in 20 minutes.
Here is the tool at work (music from Provoke the Truth):