Zenodo’s DOIs Spread AI Lies

Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. — Voltaire

Zenodo — CERN’s superfluous and mismanaged open repository — was a massive spreader of misinformation even before the age of LLMs at scale. It helped Steve Bannon spread the still-damaging and still-false conspiracy theory that Covid-19 originated in a lab. Another Zenodo preprint helped push it into the mainstream media via Real Time with Bill Maher. Zenodo helped a poser claim he possessed the world’s highest IQ, an assertion that is self-invalidating. It helped the group formerly fronted by RFK, Jr., foment more vaccine hesitancy.

And it does it all with homegrown DOIs to ensure all the hooks are in place for the Automated Box of Confusion to run quickly and efficiently.

Reporters at 404 Media have been doing a bang-up job lately covering how AI slop is infiltrating scientific and academic information systems, including an AI slop TikTok shop pushing recalled supplements, a company offering “100% Human-Written, Never AI” medical research that is entirely AI, and now a group of fake AI science authorities and experts being used in various malevolent ways, including as part of a postmortem smear campaign against a nurse violently killed by ICE agents (Alex Pretti).