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Cake day: June 27th, 2023

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  • 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.




  • 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/