GPT-fabricated scientific papers on Google Scholar: Key features, spread, and implications for preempting evidence manipulation https://misinforeview.hks.harvard.edu/article/gpt-fabricated-scientific-papers-on-google-scholar-key-features-spread-and-implications-for-preempting-evidence-manipulation/
"Roughly two-thirds of the retrieved papers were found to have been produced, at least in part, through undisclosed, potentially deceptive use of GPT. The majority (57%) of these questionable papers dealt with policy-relevant subjects (i.e., environment, health, computing), susceptible to influence operations. Most were available in several copies on different domains (e.g., social media, archives, and repositories).
Two main risks arise from the increasingly common use of #GPT to (mass-)produce #fake, scientific #publications. First, the abundance of fabricated “studies” seeping into all areas of the #research infrastructure threatens to overwhelm the scholarly communication system and jeopardize the integrity of the scientific record. A second risk lies in the increased possibility that convincingly scientific-looking content was in fact deceitfully created with #AI tools and is also optimized to be retrieved by publicly available academic search engines, particularly #GoogleScholar. However small, this possibility and awareness of it risks undermining the basis for #trust in #scientificKnowledge and poses serious societal risks."
#science #AIEthics

Just met a person who thinks that Covid was probably a nasty flu.

Which is not utterly distant to respiratory disease scientists insisting for +80 years that "It's not airborne" and even this year, "Surgical masks are good enough."

Arguing from "#ScientificKnowledge is the product of inter-related communities all trying to disprove their hypotheses" now looks pretty hollow.

The harm these jokes have done to the credibility of our best source of knowledge about the physical world is immense.