Once upon a time, when there were many fewer academic journals than there are now, a scientist or team would submit a paper on their research, and then scientists in the same general area with no connection to the authors would then review the paper before it was accepted for publishing.
Today, science journalism is a cutthroat industry, and we have artificial intelligence to help create shortcuts. A paper published in the journal Frontiers drew peer review from the public for its AI-generated images. The authors disclose that the illustrations were generated by the program Midjourney, but they are so inaccurate and badly labelled as to be completely useless. Science integrity consultant Elisabeth Bik described the image above as "a bunch of pizzas with pink salami and blue tomatoes." But the real show-stopper is an image of a rat with the world's largest penis and four testes. Now, science illustrations will often enlarge an important inset, but will indicate this somehow. This rat's parts are labeled with words like iollotte sserotgomar, testtomcels, dissilced, and dck. The testtomcels label points to the rat's hind leg. But at least the word Rat is spelled correctly.
A commenter who knows more about molecular biology than I do says the text appears to be AI-generated in places, too. Twitter is having a good time with the paper.
really, the only thing i'd take issue with here is the unclear labeling of the diƨlocttal stem ells.
— Paranoid Delusion Mocker, Professional Gangstalker (@legs_snail) February 15, 2024
One day after Bik posted her article, Frontiers has retracted the paper. A document of the original is still available. -via Metafilter
(Image source: Frontiers)