Relatedly, AI is fucking up academic copy-editing.

Meanwhile,

One of the world’s largest academic publishers is selling a book on the ethics of artificial intelligence research that appears to be riddled with fake citations, including references to journals that do not exist.

Ben Williamson, editor of the journal Learning, Media and Technology:

Checking new manuscripts today I reviewed a paper attributing 2 papers to me I did not write. A daft thing for an author to do of course. But intrigued I web searched up one of the titles and that’s when it got real weird… So this was the non-existent paper I searched for:

Williamson, B. (2021). Education governance and datafication. European Educational Research Journal, 20(3), 279–296.

But the search result I got was a bit different…

Here’s the paper I found online:

Williamson, B. and Piattoeva, N. (2022) Education Governance and Datafication. Education and Information Technologies, 27, 3515-3531.

Same title but now with a coauthor and in a different journal! Nelli Piattoeva and I have written together before but not this…

And so checked out Google Scholar. Now on my profile it doesn’t appear, but somwhow on Nelli’s it does and … and … omg, IT’S BEEN CITED 42 TIMES almost exlusively in papers about AI in education from this year alone…

Which makes it especially weird that in the paper I was reviewing today the precise same, totally blandified title is credited in a different journal and strips out the coauthor. Is a new fake reference being generated from the last?..

I know the proliferation of references to non-existent papers, powered by genAI, is getting less surprising and shocking but it doesn’t make it any less potentially corrosive to the scholarly knowledge environment.

Razor and Blade Model

HACK THE PLANET

deleted by creator

Relatedly:

As is typical for educators these days, Heiss was following up on citations in papers to make sure that they led to real sources — and weren’t fake references supplied by an AI chatbot. Naturally, he caught some of his pupils using generative artificial intelligence to cheat: not only can the bots help write the text, they can supply alleged supporting evidence if asked to back up claims, attributing findings to previously published articles. […] That in itself wasn’t unusual, however. What Heiss came to realize in the course of vetting these papers was that AI-generated citations have now infested the world of professional scholarship, too. Each time he attempted to track down a bogus source in Google Scholar, he saw that dozens of other published articles had relied on findings from slight variations of the same made-up studies and journals. […] That’s because articles which include references to nonexistent research material — the papers that don’t get flagged and retracted for this use of AI, that is — are themselves being cited in other papers, which effectively launders their erroneous citations.

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-features/ai-chatbot-journal-research-fake-citations-1235485484/

ACM is now showing an AI “summary” of a recent paper of mine on the DL instead of the abstract. As an author, I have not granted ACM the right to process my papers in this way, and will not. They should either roll back this (mis)feature or remove my papers from the DL.

https://infosec.exchange/@hovav/115731038692335809

The ACM has fallen

https://types.pl/@wilbowma/115733550130706711

https://types.pl/@arjen@idf.social/115736432049018026

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=luEDui2zAUw

He was doing the easy sex-swapping thing in The Ophiuchi Hotline, several years before Steel Beach.

Or, since we already know that it’s insipid fashtech with the cortical impact of moonshine, we could… not do that. Instead of wasting carbon on a joke about failing to synthesize a joke, maybe pet a cat? Drink a hot cocoa? Sing along to the "oh oh oh"s in “Sweet Caroline”?

Merriam-Webster’s human editors have chosen slop as the 2025 Word of the Year. We define slop as “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” All that stuff dumped on our screens, captured in just four letters: the English language came through again.

https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/word-of-the-year?2025-share

“Your mother shubscribed to makshimum, unbounded shcale last night, Trebek.”

An academic sneer delivered through the arXiv-o-tube:

Large Language Models are useless for linguistics, as they are probabilistic models that require a vast amount of data to analyse externalized strings of words. In contrast, human language is underpinned by a mind-internal computational system that recursively generates hierarchical thought structures. The language system grows with minimal external input and can readily distinguish between real language and impossible languages.

John Scalzi:

I search my name on a regular basis, not only because I am an ego monster (although I try not to pretend that I’m not) but because it’s a good way for me to find reviews, end-of-the-year “best of” lists my book might be on, foreign publication release dates, and other information about my work that I might not otherwise see, and which is useful for me to keep tabs on. In one of those searches I found that Grok (the “AI” of X) attributed to one of my books (The Consuming Fire) a dedication I did not write; not only have I definitively never dedicated a book to the characters of Frozen, I also do not have multiple children, just the one.

https://whatever.scalzi.com/2025/12/13/ai-a-dedicated-fact-failing-machine-or-yet-another-reason-not-to-trust-it-for-anything/

There’s a version animated in the style of the '70s Star Trek cartoon that makes it legitimately great.

Purdue and Google recently expanded their strategic partnership, emphasizing the importance of public-private partnerships that are essential to accelerating innovation in AI.

https://www.purdue.edu/ai/

Translation: somebody’s getting paid off

🎶 Money makes the world go 'round 🎶

This is what you get when you take Star Trek episodes where the writers had run out of ideas and watch them from the bottom of a K-hole.

And just think, he’s been further pickling his brain for half a decade since then.

I miss n-gate but that was what, 8 years ago.

Only four (August 2021).

Do you remember where Piper said that? Somewhere on Xitter? It sounds familiar. (Edit: here it is. I remembered the “James Damore was egregiously wronged” part but had mostly forgotten the rest.)

Damore’s memo blew up in 2017; ScienceBlogs was a shambling husk after most of the serious writers left in 2010, when management decided to offer Pepsi an advertorial disguised as a “nutrition” blog. (I left too, but I wasn’t a serious writer by any stretch of the imagination.) That capped off a long trend of the Seed Media Group management not listening to the bloggers, even though SB was the best thing they had going for them. Complaints on the back-channel forum were downplayed or ignored, etc. SB puttered along under National Geographic’s ownership through the Damore era, but the writing was on the wall in 2010 that the site couldn’t last.

The community that had formerly focused on SB got another nasty knock a few years later, when sexual harassment allegations came out about Bora Zivkovic, one of the prime organizers of the ScienceOnline conferences. That was a real betrayal that wounded a lot of people, and the organization only held on for one more conference before going belly-up.

“Skepticism” that acts to cover for bad science that hurts people deserves a retraction, not a disapproving shrug.