Most of you know there’s a site that is tracking case filings with AI hallucinations. There’s also one tracking AI use in academic papers. Or should I say misuse?

Back in June, I covered the database that Damien Charlotin has been compiling tracking legal decisions in cases where generative AI produced hallucinated content – typically fake citations, but also other types of arguments – or at least where GenAI is suspected to be responsible for fake content.

When I covered it on June 9th, there were 149 cases identified. Now, there are more than twice as many cases – 310, when I checked an hour or so ago. Think the problem is going away anytime soon? Me neither.

I’m continuing to provide weekly updates each week in the Kitchen Sink to keep you all informed.

On the AI hallucinations site, Damien also states this: “Readers may also be interested in this project regarding AI use in academic papers.” Guess what? I’m one of those readers who is interested! 😉

The site is Academ-AI, which documents the adverse effects of AI in academia, particularly suspected instances of AI being used to author research without appropriate declaration. The articles listed on the site have been identified based on phrases that strongly suggest AI use (highlighted in each quoted passage).

The creator of this site is Alex Glynn, MA, Research Literacy and Communications Instructor at the Kornhauser Health Sciences Library, University of Louisville. Alex previously worked for three years at the University’s School of Medicine in the Division of Infectious Diseases, where he was appointed Managing Editor for the Division’s Journal of Respiratory Infections until my departure in August 2023. So, yeah, I think he knows a bit about academic papers. 🤣

The About page on Academ-AI discusses the parameters of the site, including what to do if you suspect the use of AI in a published research article, and how you can contact him if you believe that an article has been wrongly included. He also discusses what’s in scope that he’s tracking (journal articles, conference papers/proceedings, and books/chapters) and out of scope (theses, preprints, blog posts, and other media).

Despite a limitation in scope, there are a lot of examples identified – 772 in all! That includes 633 journal articles, 111 conference papers, and 28 books and chapters. Wow.

And, clearly, Academ-AI is looking for egregious examples like I discussed in this post last year. Examples of phrases that tip off the use of AI include: “Certainly, here are”, “As of our knowledge cutoff”, “As an AI language model, I must”, “new developments may have occurred since my last update”.

Apparently, many who are using AI in research papers don’t even have rudimentary proofreading skills (or at least the inclination to apply the skills they do have).

Academ-AI also includes “articles with errata”, which fall into two categories: 1) articles corrected or retracted with a formal statement announcing and explaining the change, and 2) articles corrected or retracted without such a statement or simply noting that a change occurred without further explanation (which Academ-AI refers to as “stealth corrections”). 🙄

And Academ-AI tracks the examples by major publishers. Elsevier (which was discussed in my post last year) has 34 examples, which is a lot. But the publisher with the most examples is the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, with a whopping 90! IEEE! 🤣

You can check out Academ-AI at the link here.

So, what do you think? Are you surprised there is so much AI use in academic papers? Please share any comments you might have or if you’d like to know more about a particular topic.

Image created using Bing Image Creator Powered by DALL-E, using the term “robot reading a paper and putting a hand over its face in disbelief”. No, I don’t know where that hand came from either. 🤣

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