It's yet another reminder of why blindly 'trusting the science' may not always be the best go-to move in the future.
217 year old Wiley science publisher has reportedly "peer reviewed" more than 11,000 papers that were determined to be fake without ever noticing. The papers were referred to as "naked gobbledygook sandwiches", Australian blogger Jo Nova wrote on her blog last week.
"It’s not just a scam, it’s an industry," she said. "Who knew, academic journals were a $30 billion dollar industry?"
According to Nova's post, professional cheating services are employing AI to craft seemingly "original" academic papers by shuffling around words. For instance, terms like "breast cancer" morphed into "bosom peril," and a "naïve Bayes" classifier turns into "gullible Bayes."
Similarly, in one paper, an ant colony was bizarrely rebranded as an "underground creepy crawly state."
The misuse of terminology extends to machine learning, where a 'random forest' is whimsically translated to 'irregular backwoods' or 'arbitrary timberland'.
Nova writes that shockingly, these papers undergo peer review without any rigorous human oversight, allowing egregious errors, like converting 'local average energy' to 'territorial normal vitality', to slip through.