A leading scientific journal faces humiliation after it published a completely fake paper, purportedly written by Chinese researchers, which contained AI generated images of a rat with a penis bigger than its own body.
The Telegraph reports that the journal Frontiers in Cell and Development Biology published a paper that claimed to show the signalling pathway of sperm stem cells, but depicted a rat sitting upright with a massive dick and four giant testicles.
The illustration was reportedly created by using Midjourney, the AI imaging tool, which added labels to the ridiculous diagram using terms that don’t exist, including “dissilced”, “testtomcels” and “senctolic”.
https://modernity.news/2024/02/17/leading-scientific-journal-publishes-fake-ai-generated-paper-about-rat-with-giant-penis/
…
Another ludicrous image to the right of the rat displays “sterrn cells” in a Petri dish being spooned out.
https://modernity.news/2024/02/17/leading-scientific-journal-publishes-fake-ai-generated-paper-about-rat-with-giant-penis/
User on X, previously Twitter, had a good time.
Erm, how did Figure 1 get past a peer reviewer?! https://t.co/pAkRmfuVed H/T @aero_anna pic.twitter.com/iXpZ1FvM1G
— Dr CJ Houldcroft 🕷️ (@DrCJ_Houldcroft) February 15, 2024
The paper has officially been retracted.
For more read the article at m o d e r n i t y or the original paywalled article at The Telegraph if you have an account.
HT/RonPE
That illustration is the sort of thing the old National Lampoon would have run.
I still treasure their fake Volkswagen ad: “If Ted Kennedy had been driving a Volkswagen, he’d be President today!”
I was thinking of a parody James Bond movie ad—The Spy With the Biggest Penis You Ever Saw
If Ted Kennedy had a penis as big as this mouse he wouldn’t be able to drive a Volkswagen.
Looks like the spitting image of Michael Mann to me.
Mickey had this big fantasy thing sticking upwards, as well. !
More like MAD or CRACKED.
The National Lampoon had a nastier edge than MAD. MAD never would have run “The Nazi Issue”.
The only way they could have improved it is by changing the name of Liang Dong to Long Dong.
Doesn’t that make you think the whole thing is a spoof from beginning to end?
I’m confident it went through a rigorous peen-review process.
That’s probably what the Chinese AI was going for!
Some of the non-words look like Optical Character Recognition errors (if you’ve ever converted a “scanned” document into “readable”/”editable” text).
Nothing surprises me anymore with the stinkers in residence-
Australia plans “world-first” drive-by wireless charging for electric trucks (thedriven.io)
Reminds me of the story of ‘Bert Kelly’s Cow’-
Bert Kelly – Wikipedia
As quoted about Bert-
Bert was opposed to protectionism … because it created a situation in which governments, in the person of ministers or officials, granted arbitrary and capricious favours to some, who were thus greatly enriched, at the expense of others, who were at best impoverished and at worst, ruined.
Bert as The Modest Farmer/Member in an age of protectionism told the story of his milking cow that was so used to being milked regularly he only had to rattle the bucket on approach for the cow to start dispensing milk on the floor and welcome to Gummint.
Boy, that didn’t take long.
This was well played by pranksters exploiting ‘scientific journal’ weaknesses, plus AI. Some simple fast research follows.
The ‘journal’ FCDevBio has a total of 115k citations from inception. Nothing.
There is no on line access fee, and authors retain copyright. So pay to play publication. Just like a lot of lesser climate nonsense.
And some prankster just paid to play, Well worth the publication fee. Charles, was that you?
“Charles the mod” engaging in mischief? No, can’t be LOL
Wasn’t me
No, it doesn’t look like you. The retracted rat has only four paws.
They almost matched the Scientific American.
They say the article was “retracted”.
Hmm … They could have chosen better phrasing … 😎
Went limp?
Tucked away?
Withdrawn early?
Buried.
Shrank? The paper obviously gave it a cold reception.
Perhaps excessively circumcised.
The rat lost interest.
“A leading scientific journal”
It is a Frontiers journal. A recent (since 2007) profit-making venture; not a “leading” journal. The outfit is known for publishing flaky papers.
Well, I agree that the journal doesn’t have the historied legacy of the Fortean Times or the considerable readership of Scientific American. but..
The diagram did correctly identify “Rat”!
So it still surpasses most reportage of science on the legacied and widely consumed news networks.
Nick Stokes, your problem is that leading journals have the same bad reputation.
Let me offer my own personal example.
Marcott published a hockeystick reconstruction in Science, 2013, It took me only weeks to prove he had committed scientific misconduct. The proof involved comparing his Oregon PhD thesis on which the article was based to his published Science paper.. I even found a simple smoking gun fraud graphic comparison in both.
So, I wrote it up with proofs and sent to then Science editor in chief Marsha McNutt, requesting retraction. It was received, because her assistant acknowledged receipt. Then nothing.
The details are explained in essay ‘A High Stick Foul’ in my ebook Blowing Smoke. You might learn something by buying it (cheap) and reading it.
Rud,
Genuine scientific readers are not interested in yoyr gotcha stuff. Marcott’s contribution was a reconstruction of the whole Holocene. All you seem interested in is the last century, well covered by thermometers, and sparsely covered by proxies. As Marcott said, the reconstruction in that time was not robust. In fact, he got, not a hockey stick, but a spike around 1940, which came back down. That doesn’t suit anyone’s narrative. Steve McIntyre did his own emulation based on that data, and got a similar spike around 2000.
So fraud and how Science was deceived isnt interesting to their readers. ?
More likely protecting their reputation and their reviewers( actually their grad students)
Where have we heard that mantra before about ‘doesnt matter ‘ even if its wrong.
Allowing some researchers to fake it till they make it is never on.
There was no fraud and no deception.
Nick, you obviously did not read my paper.
Marcott specifically claimed in his Science paper that there was no core top redating, Yet a comparison of two of his own figures ( thesis, Science) proved there was. That expressly comprises scientific misconduct, You lose again.
I as a lawyer would not have made the potentially libelous claim against Marcott unless absolutely certain. Since truth is an absolute defense to libel/defamation. You lose again.
Nick, are you qualified to speak for genuine scientific readers?
Yes.
Maybe once.. not any more !!
Your rampant AGW-zealotry makes everything you say meaningless. !
No longer a real scientist… even if you once pretended to be one.
Absolute full beclownment.
The question is are you the real Nick Stokes? Nick used to write thought-provoking comments. Now it is just alarmist gibberish.
George, just like micky Mann, Nick is a scientific god … in his own mind
& a clown in everyone else’s.
What is a “scientific reader”? Is that someone who knows how to read between the lines but doesn’t because because of lack of interest?
Nick, if proxies don’t match up with thermometers why do you think they match up with reality before there were thermometers?
A recent (since 2007) profit-making venture
The AGW scam started much earlier than that…
.. and has published some equally ludicrous papers.
More than 10,000 research papers were retracted in 2023 – a new record
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03974-8
And thats only the ‘tip of the iceberg’
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4WwJ6OVSwkM
For some reason that song came to mind LOL
Was this paper peer reviewed?
Probably by an AI reviewer with an artificial sense of humor
A peer-reviewed journal. Riiiiiiiight.
When I was at Uni about twenty years ago there was this ‘deconstruction’ philosophical entity favoured by Jacques Derrida et al. Some bright spark wrote a paper full of the phraseology which got into the main journal and was complete nonsense. Typical of the climate scene where protagonists are so far up themselves that they get careless about the truth.
‘All style, no substance.’ It’s common in the type of imbeciles that do the bare minimum to scrape a pass but expect top marks for ‘looking good.’
Bwahahahahahahaha-
Bask in the warm glow of the elitists burning their money for the message. (youtube.com)
Caught with their pants down around their ankles.
Is AI going to break up the internet completely because nobody can trust any online digital image or presentation in future? Already nothing digital is hackproof and increasingly everything can be doctored manipulated and faked. This has huge ramifications for the value of search engines aggregators and disseminators. What a shambolic future.
Freud would have fun with this one!
If publishing completely fabricated drivel leads to retraction, how is the CAGW scam still alive?
Eco/sustainability has emotional appeal like fluffy kittens so there’s half your support base right there particularly if you’ve inculcated them from knee high kindy to Uni Humanities/Arts grasshoppers. Then weather worrying from around the globe is right there on their touchscreens 24/7/365 to continually push their emotional buttons.
They don’t have to actually do anything eco/sustainable personally but just vote for virtue signalling saviours to make the world of men and their ‘dark Satanic mills’ take care of it all. Well apart from soy milk lattes, the odd vegan/cleansing diet phase, buying organic makeup and the like of course. Men taking care of the ick/yukky hard yards are naturally not impressed by the thought of taking away their fundamental lifesaving tool with reliable energy but they’re a dwindling number anyway and it will all run on e-motion without them.
Ipso facto the West can no longer reproduce itself (howsabout open borders perhaps?) except for a few curious anomalies. Skilled tradey men are a scarce but necessary commodity so they’re rolling in it and smart hypergamous conservative women scoop them up early for traditional marriage children and fine housing in the best suburbs. You can’t help but notice that with my sparky son and his footballer tradey mates with their uni degree wives and children. Choose early choose well young women and eschew Metoo and toxic social media or you’ll be lonely old cat ladies in vast numbers it seems. Watch for that with a very talented 32 yr old Phd pop singer and her footballer boyfriend as the biology clock is ticking. Which direction will she turn girls?