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3 weeks ago
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A review article with some obviously fake and non-scientific illustrations created by Artificial Intelligence (AI) was the talk on X (Twitter) today.
The figures in the paper were generated by the AI tool Midjourney, which generated some pretty, but nonsensical, illustrations with unreadable text.
It appears that neither the editor nor the two peer reviewers looked at the figures at all. The paper was peer-reviewed within a couple of weeks and published two days ago.
Dear readers, today I present you: the rat with the enormous family jewels and the diƨlocttal stem ells.
The paper by Xinyu Guo et al., Cellular functions of spermatogonial stem cells in relation to JAK/STAT signaling pathway, Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology 2024, DOI 10.3389/fcell.2023.1339390 [link to PDF, in case the publisher removes it], easily passed editorial and peer review.
The authors disclose that the figures were generated by Midjourney, but the images are – ahem – anatomically and scientifically incorrect.
Figure 1 features an illustration of a rat, sitting up like a squirrel, with four enormous testicles and a giant … penis? The figure includes indecipherable labels like ‘testtomcels‘, ‘senctolic‘, ‘dissilced‘, ‘iollotte sserotgomar‘ and ‘diƨlocttal stem ells’. At least the word ‘rat‘ is correct.
One of the insets shows a ‘retat‘, with some ‘sterrn cells‘ in a Petri dish with a serving spoon. Enjoy!
Figure 2 appears to show an impressive scientific diagram of the JAK-STAT signaling pathway. Or does it explain how to make a donut with colorful sprinkles? Again the words and numbers are made up. What do ‘signal bıidimg the recetein‘, ‘Sinkecler‘, ‘dimimeriom eme‘, ‘Tramioncatiion of 2xℇpens‘, ‘ↄ‘, and ‘proprounization‘ mean? [my spell checker is getting very angry with me].
Figure 3 appears to show a bunch of pizzas with pink salami and blue tomatoes.
Of course, we can have a good laugh at these figures, and wonder how on earth the handling editor and the two peer reviewers didn’t catch this.
But the paper is actually a sad example of how scientific journals, editors, and peer reviewers can be naive – or possibly even in the loop – in terms of accepting and publishing AI-generated crap. These figures are clearly not scientifically correct, but if such botched illustrations can pass peer review so easily, more realistic-looking AI-generated figures have likely already infiltrated the scientific literature. Generative AI will do serious harm to the quality, trustworthiness, and value of scientific papers.
The Tadpole Paper Mill papers – a set of 600 fabricated papers from the same design studio – were perhaps one of the earliest examples of peer-reviewed papers containing computer-generated images of Western blots. We were able to identify them as fakes because all blots had the same background.
But recent advances in AI technology mean we’re already past the stage where a human can distinguish a fake photo from a real photo. Just take this recent New York Times quiz to see if you can spot the difference.
