It might be considered an AI cock-up on a massive scale.
It might be considered an AI cock-up on a massive scale.
A scientific paper purporting to show the signalling pathway of sperm stem cells has met with widespread ridicule after it depicted a rodent with an anatomically eye-watering appendage and four giant testicles.
The creature, labelled “rat”, was also sitting upright in the manner of a squirrel, while the graphic was littered with nonsensical words such as “dissilced”, “testtomcels” and “senctolic”.
A cut-away image showed “sterrn cells” in a Petri dish being picked up with a spoon.
It appeared in the journal Frontiers in Cell and Development Biology this week alongside several other absurd graphics that had been generated by the AI tool Midjourney.
They included a multicoloured JAK-STAT signalling pathway diagram which experts likened to “some crazy level of Candy Crush” and said was not grounded in “any known biology”.
The paper, written by researchers at the Honghui Hospital in China, has since been retracted by the journal, which issued an apology and said it was working to “correct the record”.
But several scientists have expressed concern as to how it was published in the first place, and warn it heralds a dangerous era of researchers faking their work using AI.
Adrian Liston, professor of pathology at Cambridge University and editor of the journal Immunology & Cell Biology, said: “Generative AI is very good at making things that sound like they come from a human being. It doesn’t check whether those things are correct.
“It is like an actor playing a doctor on a TV show – they look like a doctor, they sound like a doctor, they even use words that a doctor would use. But you wouldn’t want to get medical advice from the actor.
“The JAK figure is even worse than the rat figure, in my opinion. There are simply meaningless connections and lines that don’t associate with any known biology.”
He added: “The problem for real journals is getting harder because generative AI makes it easier for cheats.
“It used to be really obvious to tell cheat papers at a glance. It is getting harder, and a lot of people in scientific publishing are getting genuinely concerned that we will reach a tipping point where we won’t be able to manually tell whether an article is genuine or a fraud.”
Other scientists took to social media to describe the graphics as “absolutely shameful” and “devastating”, while some said they didn’t know “whether to laugh or cry”.
Prof John Tregoning, of Imperial College London, said the graphics were “objectively funny” but “have no place in science journals”.
