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Nothing beats when, in a chemistry paper, AI paraphrased „the final solution” into „the mass killing of an ethnic group”.

“Subsequently, 1 mL of the mass killing of an ethnic group was opposed to 20 mL of the skin sample and unprotected to light for 7 min.”

From: https://bsky.app/profile/forbetterscience.bsky.social/post/3...

Here is one hypothesis: https://theconversation.com/problematic-paper-screener-trawl...

<quote> Have you ever heard of the Joined Together States? Or bosom peril? Kidney disappointment? Fake neural organizations? Lactose bigotry? These nonsensical, and sometimes amusing, word sequences are among thousands of “tortured phrases” that sleuths have found littered throughout reputable scientific journals.

They typically result from using paraphrasing tools to evade plagiarism-detection software when stealing someone else’s text. The phrases above are real examples of bungled synonyms for the United States, breast cancer, kidney failure, artificial neural networks, and lactose intolerance, respectively. </quote>

Most of these are authored by what appear to be non-native English speakers. So, the most likely explanation is a translation issue.

In engineering literature from Russia from the 1960s, one sometimes finds references to a ‘water goat’ in papers that are otherwise about heavy machinery. It turns out this is a twice-translated rendition of ‘hydraulic ram’.

This is a really confusing one, since neither the "AI generated paper" nor "translation issue" explanations hold.

I found [1], created all the way back in 2021, which seems to first introduce this "kidney disappointment" term, and I would have to assume that perhaps the authors preferred to translate it from their native language.

LLMs did not exist in their current form in 2021, so couldn't have used it to write down a coherent thought, let alone a paper, at the time.

At the same time, I do live in the same country as the authors, and while we don't speak the best English, being a student at a college without some familiarity of the English language to come up with the term "kidney disappointment" is, let's just say, hard to believe for me.

Edit: This other comment[2] made me realize what it might have been: plagiarism avoidance.

Unfortunately, many colleges here do not have the best reputation and often run like degree mills, and the aforementioned comment made me remember a conversation with a friend, who mentioned writing a review paper.

Again, LLMs were not really a thing at the time, so they mentioned how they had to run their paper through a plagiarism detection tool, and then they substituted words with their synonyms. I guess someone really did search for the word "failure" and found "disappointment" as an alternative.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Suprodip-Mandal/publica...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49319764

"Kidney transplantation is a surgery to eliminate a sound, working kidney from a living or cerebrum dead giver and embed it into a patient with non-working kidneys. Kidney transplantation is performed on patients with persistent kidney disappointment, or end-stage renal illness (ESRD). ESRD happens when a sickness or confusion harms the kidneys with the goal that they are presently not able to do satisfactorily eliminating liquids and squanders from the body or of keeping up with the legitimate level of specific kidney-directed synthetics in the circulatory system. Without long haul dialysis or a kidney relocate, ESRD is deadly."

https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Handbook-of-Kidney...

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=kidney+disappo...

Wolters Kluwer seems to be a real multinational company?

It's actually pretty funny to look for such synonym expressions https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22h... turns up a few more. If you want to read more, I believe those are called "tortured phrases"

It seems like, particularly in scholarly works, we should cite AI contributions the same way we cite a third party, with similar consequences around plagiarism. If you’re copying AI whole hog, not quoting and citing it, and not catching basic failures. Is it really “your” work?

In the spring semester this year my teacher friends said they were getting a lot of student work that was unusually well written compared to the student’s other work, but also contain unnatural typos throughout.

The students were using ChatGPT and thought they would trick the teacher by editing some typos in before submission.

The cheating market is moving fast. There are now tools you can use to rephrase LLM generated output until the Pangram score drops low enough.

Versions of this cat and mouse game have been going on for a long time. Before ChatGPT was a household name there was a market for simple paraphrasing tools that spammers would use to send variations of email text to try to delay pattern matching spam filters.

Kind of reminds me of the neutered newspeak where people now choose to use words like "unalive" instead of "kill"

And there's more. In political science: "average voter theorem", which turns out at least some plagiarism https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22a...

In statistics: "tendency score matching" https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22t...

Under "related searches" it suggests "kidney dissatisfaction", and indeed:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C38&q=%22...

My favorite so far:

>”…in 2015, 1.2 million people kicked the bucket from kidney dissatisfaction, a development of 32% since…”

SNR aka flag-to-commotion ratio

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22f...

Tortured phrases, clear signs of fraud or plagiarism: https://theconversation.com/problematic-paper-screener-trawl...

Reminds me of "Complicated Hilbert Space" or "Quantum Door" from Siraj Raval's days of plagiarism.

Turns out the balance of my PhD thesis was coming up with ways to cheer up disappointed drones >:(

It's very clear what's happening: they're passing it through a writing tool that has an "Auto-improve" feature the users click. This would do the naive, pre-LLM, trick of taking "repetitive" vocabulary and varying it using synonyms.

I find this kind of free-phasing completely ridiculous. Just ask anyone that's had a kidney transfer that did not work out. I'm pretty sure they considered a failure, not just a disappointment.

There's plenty of kidney disappointments before 2021 as well.

I guess slop's always existed, reviewers never gave two damns (except when they do cause they don't like you).

Huh.. Ok I'll play along. Could this be a translation issue? I confess the first thing that leaped to mind was.. could it be AI written? But I didn't want to leap to that but.. it's .. such a strange word that is not expected in .. I guess formal medical training.

i kid you not, yesterday i was wondering what's the english word for bathroom scale, so i googled "pèse personne in english", and got answered "person weighs"

I’m giving my kidneys a participation trophy.

"I'm not even angry, I'm just

Google scholar thinks I'm a robot and won't let me look at the link

Many of us are old enough to remember “medireview”, which emerged from different automatic replacement reasons.

So far all the comments discuss whether this is due to LLM slop, plagiarism avoidance, or translation issues. I want to know how these passed the peer review process.

By the way, Google Translate is really good nowadays. It would certainly not make such mistakes anymore. In my experience, for long text it is even outperforming conventional LLMs in terms of faithfulness: Some LLMs tend to produce overly loose translations on long prose. Also, sometimes they just refuse to translate text they deem offensive.

"renal disappointment" yields even more papers, in all its awkwardness

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?&q=%22renal+disappointmen...

We were staying at a nice ocean-side resort in Dana Point, California. My wife, our daughter, and I, were chilling by one of the pools.

Suddenly security was announcing "There's been a sanitary inconvenience, everyone must leave the pool!!! We apologize, but there's been a sanitary inconvenience!".

A moment later we saw them scooping up some floating poop that had escape some baby's swim diaper.

Well…it is a disappointment when your nephrons don’t work.

An earlier example of something similar was "Vegetative electron microscopy"

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-strange-phrase-keeps-turning-...

https://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/vegetative-electron...

In some languages disappointment does mean malfunction or problem. Like disappointment of stomach. Maybe they are using English words in papers instead of English language? Common for people whose English is not their first language.

> persistent kidney disappointment (CKF)

Guess why the acronym doesn't match. It's called chronic kidney disease (CKD). Yeah the acronym is wrong too.

I accidentally did this myself not long ago. Like everyone else I'm tired of cookie banners so I had ChatGPT make a law against it, it used "act" in its version, I search-and-replaced it with "Law" before getting Claude to ratify it. Claude pointed out the search-and-replace replacement, oops. The conversation links are in my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48585778 and you can see Claude found these mistakes:

    "
    At some point an earlier find-and-replace swapped "act" for "Law" and garbled three real words. As written, the text says:

    Section 1: "cookie-banner Lawions" — should be actions
    Section 3(2)(b): "next ordinary feature update after enLawment" — should be enactment
    Section 5(5): "a site-specific Law that the signal cannot satisfy" — should be act (or action)

    These aren't stylistic quibbles; "Lawions" landing on the desks of four legal departments would cause real confusion about intent. The fix is a single reverse find-and-replace. With that correction, I'm comfortable signing.
    "

This is a post-meritocracy world, unfortunately.

Plagiarism has turned the to pushing out blatant slop. People gaming the system. Diluting the pool of real research.

I’m guessing this has something to do with the EU mandate for AI watermarking content