Massive Study Detects AI Fingerprints In Millions of Scientific Papers
- Reference: 0178305800
- News link: https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/07/07/231226/massive-study-detects-ai-fingerprints-in-millions-of-scientific-papers
- Source link:
> The researchers modeled their investigation on prior COVID-19 public-health [2]research , which was able to infer COVID-19's impact on mortality by comparing excess deaths before and after the pandemic. By applying the same before-and-after approach, the new study analyzed patterns of excess word use prior to the emergence of LLMs and after. The researchers found that after the release of LLMs, there was a significant shift away from the excess use of "content words" to an excess use of "stylistic and flowery" word choices, such as "showcasing," "pivotal," and "grappling."
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> By manually assigning parts of speech to each excess word, the authors determined that before 2024, 79.2% of excess word choices were nouns. During 2024 there was a clearly identifiable shift. 66% of excess word choices were verbs and 14% were adjectives. The team also identified notable differences in LLM usage between research fields, countries, and venues.
The findings have been [3]published in the journal Science Advances .
[1] https://phys.org/news/2025-07-massive-ai-fingerprints-millions-scientific.html
[2] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36517599/
[3] http://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adt3813
FluffGPT (Score:1)
Example of a suspicious passage:
"This is the best scientific paper ever, believe me! It proves beyond a galactic doubt that climate change is a tremendous hoax perpetrated by deep communist woke liberals so that they had an excuse to regulate my grand and beautiful hotels and resorts, which score the highest ratings in the history of ratings, by the way, going all the way back to Ebbuh K. Neezer, loved the guy, taught me all about gold toilets, Making Shitting Great Again!"
Re: FluffGPT (Score:2)
Sounds like a tool you'd use on a date after an onset of ED.
questions about use (Score:5, Interesting)
We use AI to help with paper writing in my lab, mostly because there are only two native English speakers, and it relieves me, the lab head (and one of the two native speakers), of having to do extensive copy-editing in order to make stilted English more readable. I still read every word that gets published from the lab, but using AI for copy-editing is no different from using a human-based writing service to fix poor language. It's just cheaper and orders of magnitude faster.
So, for us, the response would be a big, "so what?" to this report.
But, if people are starting to use AI to write entire papers, that's a different story. My experience is that current models hallucinate ideas and, especially, references, at far, far to high a rate to be seriously useful as anything other than a tool that requires full, manual verification. I half-jokingly say that if a paper is hallucinated, that means the AI was unable to find the right citation, and it represents a gap in the field's knowledge that we could address. The amazing thing about the hallucinations is how convincingly real they sound: the right authors, the right titles, the right journals. These are publications that *should* exist, but don't, at least in my experience.
As a most recent example, when writing a grant application, I tried to find citations using an LLM for an idea that is widely-held in the field. Everyone knows it to be true. It's obvious that it should be true. And, yet, there have been no publications as of yet that have actually discussed the idea, so the LLM dutifully hallucinated a citation with exactly the author list you would expect to have studied the question, a title that hits the nail on the head, and a journal exactly where you might expect the paper to appear. I've told my staff that we need to get that paper written and submitted, immediately, to fill that obvious gap, before someone else does. It will likely be cited widely.
What is a fingerprint? (Score:3)
I am sure that some people let AI write stuff that they shouldn't. However, I question that "fingerprints" are in any way meaningful. Many, many people ask AI to edit their writing, to correct mistakes in spelling and grammar, to improve clarity, or whatever. I certainly do this - where I might have earlier asked a person to proofread for me, I now generally ask AI.
If there is such a thing as a uniquely identifiable "fingerprint" (which I doubt), then such editing will also create it.
Re: (Score:3)
Following up on that idea, there are various copy-editing services that many non-native English speakers use, and are encouraged to use, to help improve their writing. The main difference from the perspective of forensic detection with AI-copy-edited text is that there are a very small number of such styles compared to the likely thousands of copy-editors' individual styles, making automated copy-editing easier to detect. I'll bet dollars to donuts that if you trained an LLM on the output of a single huma
Is it LLMs? (Score:1)
> The researchers found that after the release of LLMs, there was a significant shift away from the excess use of "content words" to an excess use of "stylistic and flowery" word choices, such as "showcasing," "pivotal," and "grappling."
I don't think its LLM. Last 5-10 years journalism and writing in general has deteriorated to vapid, emotional, overhyped, and super dramatic. Scientific papers are not immune from the stupidification. Instead of the world sounding more like slashdot and getting more sophisticated as time goes on, Idiocracy was right and everyone talks more like the airheads at Dailymail.
I liked figure 5 (Score:4, Insightful)
* Technical fields (Computation, Environment, Healthcare) are more affected than Humanities (Ethics, Rehabilitation, Ecology)
* Countries Taiwan, Iran, Thailand, most affected; English-speaking countries less affected, UK least affected.
* mid/low-range publishers (MDPI, Frontiers) more affected than more prestigious houses (Nature, Cell)
All this paints picture of entry-level authors who are not comfortable with the language (for being non-native, and for working in non-humanities fields). In this case, LLMs come to replace paid correction services that authors in certain countries in particular Asia had to use to get their works through.
Re: I liked figure 5 (Score:2)
Meanwhile, those who use LLM-based corrections think they're being clever while those who don't need LLMs, language and knowledge natives, see right through it; many times one look / read is enough to tell that something is off, that something feels unnatural.
Re: (Score:2)
Well, it's hard to make it sound "natural" when it's not your native language.
So people may use someone to check their English, or Grammarly, or an LLM.
I don't think there's anything inherently wrong with that.
English speakers can feel all high and mighty about it. But remember, these other researchers are writing in their non-native language. And that can really sound "unnatural". That doesn't mean their work is less valuable.
Re: (Score:2)
There is a major difference between having a written "accent" and the kind of language created by unchecked LLMs.
Re: (Score:2)
Oi, cunt, don't do this.
If someone doesn't ask—very specifically—for your grammatical advice, you don't give it. All this kind of rampant pedantism serves is to make you look like an asshat.