“As an AI” and Predatory Journals: The Sad State of Some Academic Publishing
“As an AI” and Predatory Journals: The Sad State of Some Academic Publishing
Before I start this article, I would like to state my conclusions:
We will look back on the years before LLMs as the happy years — and where we did hard work to get our rewards for technological developments. From 2023 onwards, we will find that we started to get lazy and increasingly lost our ability to create anything.
We are becoming a slave to the machine — and it’s actually not a very good machine. Our world of technological advancement will become one which lacks any real novelty or advance and where we create fake experts who have little actual knowledge of the field.
Could we be moving into a world without any human intervention, and where machines write papers that look like research papers should, and where a human basically checks that it looks okay, and where papers are published to no one? A soulless world of research — devoid of any human spirit, emotion and creativity!
Scientific and technology advancement through peer review
Virtually every single technological advance we have in our lives — GPS, the Internet, image compression, data communications — has been achieved through research teams working together on common problems and publishing their work through the peer review process. This process is fundamentally important as it means that experts review the methodology, novelty and results and pick up any problems.
As a researcher, I spend a good deal of my own time — unpaid — reading over papers and reviewing the methods used. This often involves running code to prove the methods used. Why? Because I want to help make the work as good as possible and pass on my comments. I also reject papers that are of poor quality and would generally bring down the quality of the journal and would be embarressing for the authors and their associated institution. This peer review process happens in the assessment of PhD work, and where external examiners read over a thesis and pick it apart — with the intention to catch errors and make it as good as it can get.
Predatory journals
Often, too, you have to go through several iterations before a paper is finally published. This peer review process is also fundamentally important for career progression, and where paper publications are a core element in promotions. But, this has seen the rise of predatory journals.
Overall, my inbox is full of emails from predatory journals — in fact, my spam checker often blocks those journals that have a proven track record for publishing poor-quality content. These are publication outlets that often have terrible academic standards and basically take the money and publish with little in the way of peer review. The papers published often have little in the way of quality —and are basically a “paper mill”. Generally, academic publishing has gone down this route, and where anyone can call their journal “international”, and define impact factors which do not actually reflect the quality of the journal.
As an AI language model
Now a new Twitter thread [here] casts light on the shock standards of some of these journals, and which allow papers to pass that obviously miss out a key author — ChatGPT. The search term involves looking for the search term of “As an AI language model, I can provide some information on”:
If you are interested, here is the Web page of the IJNIET [here]:
And a simple Google search reveals that there are many published research papers:
and:
And it just gets depressing when you read the paper [here]:
The standards applied in writing these papers are shocking, and those involved should be embarrassed, along with the journals that publish the work. And, for getting ChatGPT to write a research paper, is a sad state of affairs, and if a researcher needs to AI to write their paper, then they perhaps need to consider another career.
Conclusions
We will look back on the years before LLMs as the happy years — and where we did hard work to get our rewards for technological developments. From 2023 onwards, we will find that we started to get lazy and increasingly lost our ability to create anything.
We are becoming a slave to the machine — and it’s actually not a very good machine. Our world of technological advancement will become one which lacks any real novelty or advance and where we create fake experts who have little actual knowledge of the field.
I say again … a slave to the machine who fakes knowledge.
Postscript
And, if you have time, please read: