[HN Gopher] Chemist Rafael Luque suspended without pay for thirt...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Chemist Rafael Luque suspended without pay for thirteen years
        
       Author : belter
       Score  : 80 points
       Date   : 2023-04-03 13:33 UTC (9 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (english.elpais.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (english.elpais.com)
        
       | tripdout wrote:
       | Is the problem that it was Saudia Arabia / Russia, or would this
       | have happened regardless of country due to his contract with the
       | Spanish university?
       | 
       | If it's the former, it really doesn't seem like a justified
       | reaction.
        
       | dannykwells wrote:
       | "Without me, the University of Cordoba is going to drop 300
       | places [in the Shanghai ranking]. They have shot themselves in
       | the foot," said Luque, who attributed his suspension to "pure
       | envy."
       | 
       | Seems like they really lost a real gem with this one /s
        
         | extasia wrote:
         | That quote stuck out to me to as from somebody who only cared
         | about gaming metrics rather than contributing to human
         | knowledge
        
           | sdfghswe wrote:
           | Anyone who's been in the academia will recognize that someone
           | who publishes 100 papers a year or whatever it is is just
           | gaming metrics.
        
       | greenthrow wrote:
       | Doesn't really matter how prolific he is if he violated his
       | employment contract. He should have negotiated a new contract
       | before working for Saudi Arabia and Russia. Seems like a non-
       | story.
        
         | xtracto wrote:
         | Thanks, this is a trivial thing IMHO. Worker violates working
         | agreement, news at 11. All the other fluff is just yellow
         | journalism. He uses GPt? Yawn... he publishes mainly as co-
         | author? That's completely normal in academia, particularly for
         | high ranking professors. Wait until people discover that in
         | several places in Germany, Proffesors delegate most of the PhD
         | supervising tasks to lowly post-docs.
         | 
         | It's just layman peeking at the Academia world and getting mad
         | at a cloud.
        
           | emaginniss wrote:
           | It's normal for academics to publish a study every 37 hours?
        
       | grumple wrote:
       | > They have a grudge against me because I am a very prolific
       | scientist and a lot of people adore me, because they know my
       | worth. They are envious and mediocre people
       | 
       | This guy is extremely egotistical. And he's publishing papers
       | with people he doesn't know. The article implies most of these
       | papers are of low quality... I doubt he contributed in any way to
       | many other than by adding his name. That's fairly common in
       | academia even in normal times. But in these cases it's unlikely
       | that he collaborated in any way with the authors and can't verify
       | the content of the papers.
        
         | sgift wrote:
         | Yeah, he even admits that he broke rules but obviously it's all
         | due to this genius that they are mad at him. If he would be
         | less of a 'genius' the university would have accepted it? What
         | a megalomaniac.
         | 
         | > Luque acknowledges that he skipped the established procedures
         | to collaborate with other institutions, but attributes the
         | sanction to envy and a lack of understanding.
        
       | belter wrote:
       | "...The chemist admitted that since December, he has been using
       | the artificial intelligence program ChatGPT to "polish" his
       | texts. "These months have been quite productive, because there
       | are articles that used to require two or three days and now I do
       | them in one day," he said..." WTF!
        
         | iamerroragent wrote:
         | Yeah WTF. This is just going to become standard practice within
         | years if not months.
         | 
         | Perfect application for this AI tool imo.
        
           | lisasays wrote:
           | _Perfect application for this AI tool imo._
           | 
           | Yup - credential whoring and research fraud. It's the new
           | frontier.
        
             | iamerroragent wrote:
             | That was something Luque was being accused of before using
             | AI though.
             | 
             | Using a machine to work more efficiently is not bad.
        
         | igetspam wrote:
         | Why the "WTF!"?
         | 
         | He wasn't sanctioned for using an LLM to speed up his work, so
         | seeing this as the first reply could confuse some people.
         | 
         | I've been doing this for months now too. I can get docs done in
         | a day that used to take a couple weeks because of constant
         | interruptions.
        
           | belter wrote:
           | That is not the point...It's the fact his supposed valuable
           | research, ( he is getting published after all!) is of so
           | flimsy quality, that a LLM model can be a productivity
           | improvement! That is the reason of the WTF.
           | 
           | Do you think Tesla or Einstein with a LLM model, would spit
           | out 5 new discoveries per week instead of one every decade?
        
             | adastra22 wrote:
             | Have you tried using a LLM? I don't think they are as dumb
             | as you are making out. I've used GitHub Copilot to help
             | with some lab reports this last semester, and it really
             | sped things up. It can auto fill complicated LaTeX syntax
             | and such so that I don't have to look it up. The meat of
             | the paper is mine, and I have to correct it a lot, but it
             | was definitely useful.
        
             | twelve40 wrote:
             | not a bit disturbed by whatever language tools he needs to
             | use but a paper every day (or every week) is _insane_. No
             | matter what you do, it can 't be sustainable for years as
             | he claims.
        
               | igetspam wrote:
               | And that is absolutely worthy of discussion but the use
               | of tools is a distraction from the topic. I find it
               | surprising that the author felt it was even worth
               | bringing up in the article. It makes no argument for or
               | against the subject of the article but definitely plants
               | some weird seeds of distrust for certain types of people.
        
             | coldtea wrote:
             | > _is of so flimsy quality, that a LLM model can be a
             | productivity improvement!_
             | 
             | Who said the research was of flimsy quality?
             | 
             | Who said that the discoveries (as opposed to the BS padding
             | journals require) was what LLM was used for?
             | 
             | They might or might not be. But not because he used an LLM
             | to "polish them".
        
               | belter wrote:
               | Has been publishing sometimes every 5 days, it seems
               | mostly, by being listed as co-author. I like my genius
               | with some effort and sweat. Even Terence Tao talks about
               | his challenges...
               | 
               | https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4190-1916
        
               | shadowgovt wrote:
               | What is the nature of the space he's working in?
               | 
               | Something like physics, you can have a gap of months or
               | years between a new theoretical breakthrough or the
               | completion of a new machine giving you new raw data to
               | churn through.
               | 
               | ... but chemistry is something (no offense to chemists)
               | you can do to the dirt outside your house, and _every
               | novel molecular arrangement_ can be paper-worthy.
        
               | belter wrote:
               | Let's not go that way... - https://xkcd.com/435/
        
             | shadowgovt wrote:
             | This isn't indicative of the quality of his work; it's
             | indicative that the standardized form of the research paper
             | has so much low-information boilerplate that it's semi-
             | automatable. If anything, I applaud attempts to automate it
             | (only slightly less than I applaud attempts to do away with
             | it via a new structure for these papers).
             | 
             | Complaining about this is like complaining about the fact
             | that people use IDEs to manage the imports in their Java
             | class files. Ideally, you'd stop using a crap language that
             | makes you wrap three lines of actual implementation in 50
             | lines of imports, declarations, and redundant-to-the-code
             | comments to make doxygen (and a linter) happy, but if the
             | institutional model prevents that... By all means use a
             | good IDE to do half the work for you.
        
             | greatpatton wrote:
             | For a non native English speaker, LLMs are really useful to
             | rewrite your texts in a more natural way.
        
               | whythre wrote:
               | Dude was publishing every 37 hours. He wasn't just using
               | it to 'polish' his language skills, he was churning out
               | absurdly low grade schlock with the aid of an AI and
               | getting it rubber stamped by the broken journal cartel.
        
               | dgellow wrote:
               | He was "publishing" every 37h, it seems to be mostly by
               | co-signing papers
        
               | lesuorac wrote:
               | I mean the guy was writing a paper every 2-3d without AI
               | and got it down to 1d with AI. It seems completely
               | reasonable to me that better tooling could get their time
               | down 50% (try shoveling a driveway vs using a truck ...).
               | 
               | If his was just (ab)using chatgpt to create the papers
               | from thin air then it'd be pretty easy for somebody to
               | show where the pre-chatgpt papers are and the post-
               | chatgpt papers are by the drop in quality. However,
               | nobody has been citing the content of his papers when
               | they make the claims about quality so I doubt chatgpt has
               | an impact on the quality of his papers.
        
             | rscho wrote:
             | Welcome to capitalistic science, where moar is always
             | better. You know, 40y ago when you bought a tool made of
             | stainless steel that would last for life, and now you get
             | the same out of flimsy plastic? Same thing with science.
        
         | coldtea wrote:
         | Yeah, what? Millions will do the same, and thousands are
         | already doing it...
        
         | mithr wrote:
         | Just to clarify to the casual observer, parent's quote is from
         | a one-paragraph section about how Luque's been able to be
         | particularly productive recently, rather than anything to do
         | with his suspension:
         | 
         | > The university has sanctioned Luque for working as a
         | researcher at other centers, such as the King Saud University
         | in Riyadh and the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia in
         | Moscow, despite holding a full-time publicly funded contract
         | with the Spanish institution.
        
         | sgift wrote:
         | Nice that you didn't quote the part directly after that: >
         | Luque said he basically uses it to improve his written
         | expression in English
         | 
         | What's the problem here? That a non-native speaker now doesn't
         | need as much time to write text in a foreign language?
        
           | belter wrote:
           | What your comment and others are missing is: The problem here
           | is that the fluency in English, seems to be the main
           | obstacle, to the speed at what he can publish novel research.
           | 
           | Maybe if he would be a English, Oxford educated scholar,
           | would not need ChatGPT. Could then maybe do a paper every 4
           | to 8 hours?
        
             | nequo wrote:
             | As a non-chemist academic, it is fully beyond me how anyone
             | churns out papers at a rate of one every three days. That
             | is the rate he says he has even without relying on ChatGPT.
             | 
             | Is there a lot of overlap in the contribution that each of
             | his individual papers make? Or are a lot of these
             | replication studies, carried out by different teams in
             | parallel, with him being a co-author on each of them? I'd
             | be curious to read an academic chemist about how this is
             | possible.
        
               | fock wrote:
               | He seems to have kickstarted his citation count by
               | reviews. This is sadly extremely common; a surprising
               | amount of researchers nowadays don't have an actual
               | discovery/novel experiment in their first 10 highest
               | cited papers... He now still does those in reputable
               | journals to relatively random, but en-vogue topics. Then
               | he goes out and trades his name to less visible research
               | (which is ok to do) to actual crap in 2nd to predatory
               | tier journals in exchange for more citations (probably
               | citing other works including him ;)).
               | 
               | Generally possible everywhere, also done in the none-
               | Google/Meta/... world of ML. Just look here: https://ieee
               | xplore.ieee.org/xpl/conhome/9764877/proceeding - just a
               | random collection of crap.
        
               | stefan_ wrote:
               | He has just taken the whole "metric becomes the goal"
               | thing to its logical conclusion. If you are only valued
               | by your citation count..
        
             | incone123 wrote:
             | Perhaps he could write in his native language and have a
             | machine do the translation.
             | 
             | I'm reminded of a story doing the rounds about 25 years ago
             | regarding an engineering document which had been translated
             | by a machine. The team saw a reference to a 'water sheep'
             | which they worked out meant 'hydraulic ram'.
        
           | otherme123 wrote:
           | If your paper goes to a british reviewer, or to a lesser
           | extent an USA one, you are guaranteed to have your english
           | called out. We even hired external translators to polish the
           | paper. Some (british) reviewers had returned the paper with
           | "needs total rewrite, I can't understand the english", while
           | the other says just "minor corrections" non language related.
           | 
           | I'm going to use GPT from now on, zero doubt.
        
       | t344344 wrote:
       | [flagged]
        
       | throwaway14356 wrote:
       | Humans wont have to read the papers, might as wel run them though
       | the llm to see what it makes from it. We could even require a
       | machine readable benchmark for future compatibility.
        
       | strangeloops85 wrote:
       | He admitted to publishing a paper with authors he didn't know..
       | and which external evidence suggests had authorship for sale.
       | These people are a disaster for science..
        
       | merek wrote:
       | I'm not in academia, is the industry vigilant of researchers who
       | try to game metrics, or is metric-gaming commonplace and largely
       | overlooked? Does it depend on country?
        
       | jjk166 wrote:
       | "Suspended without pay for thirteen years" sounds an awful lot
       | like "fired"
        
         | AnimalMuppet wrote:
         | Except without the actual firing. European employment laws (and
         | university rules) may have something to do with it.
        
       | boeingUH60 wrote:
       | [flagged]
        
         | coldtea wrote:
         | Or you know, to just go where he would be appreciated, probably
         | for a pay increase...
        
           | rscho wrote:
           | [flagged]
        
             | lyaa wrote:
             | In fairness, I don't think the lack of Nobel prizes is a
             | valid criticism here. The average time from discovery to a
             | Nobel is close to 30 years at the moment and the Saudis
             | built their first major research university (KAUST) in 2009
             | and their first university ever in 1961. Their economy
             | started to grow after they got some control over their oil
             | in 1972 so let's say a decade after that is when they could
             | be expected to start spending to any significant degree on
             | research. That only gives them roughly 40 years to get a
             | Nobel which is not enough without systematic support from
             | foreign governments and universities which was not there
             | due to wars, politics, and some internal Saudi policies
             | that limited their ability to attract experts and get
             | access to the latest advanced technologies.
        
             | fuzzbazz wrote:
             | In chemistry? the same number as in his current country
        
       | suddenclarity wrote:
       | I get that he was fired for other reasons but his method is a
       | plague and should be worrying for everyone. When I wrote my
       | latest paper more than half of the published papers I found
       | through research hubs were so subpar that I would've failed my
       | students if they submitted it in one of the regular assignments.
       | Anything can be published. Add some ChatGPT so it sounds
       | convincing and the practice of citing your colleagues to up the
       | stats and it will be near impossible to sort decent science from
       | junk without spending all your time on reading papers instead of
       | doing actual research.
        
         | saulpw wrote:
         | I'm also worried about this, but "impossible to sort decent
         | science from junk without spending all your time on reading
         | papers instead of doing actual research"--isn't spending all
         | your time reading papers what "actual research" is? re-search?
        
           | NotYourLawyer wrote:
           | Research is for discovering new things, not just reading old
           | things.
        
             | pvaldes wrote:
             | Is both. Reading old things, sometimes published in several
             | different languages is required to master a theme. And
             | finding it first takes an awful lot of time
        
       | Alifatisk wrote:
       | "The prolific chemist, who has published a study every 37 hours
       | this year..."
       | 
       | I found this part quite impressive until I read the following
       | part:
       | 
       | "Luque is constantly publishing papers. Last year he authored
       | some 110 articles. So far this year he has published 58. The
       | chemist admitted that since December, he has been using the
       | artificial intelligence program ChatGPT to "polish" his texts.
       | "These months have been quite productive, because there are
       | articles that used to require two or three days and now I do them
       | in one day," he said."
       | 
       | Even if this is unrelated to the actual story, I find it a tiny
       | bit disturbing. Is this the new standard practice? Let some robot
       | spew out paragraphs of text to convey the scientist research?
        
         | trabant00 wrote:
         | That sounds like gaming the system. I have a very hard time
         | imagining somebody can produce quality work every 37 hours non-
         | stop.
        
           | btilly wrote:
           | Well, work of SOME type of quality, perhaps.
           | 
           | The most prolific mathematician in history, Paul Erdos,
           | published about 1500 papers over about 60 years. That comes
           | out to a little more than 2 a month.
           | 
           | That's close to an upper bound on what should be possible
           | without some form of cheating.
        
             | oofabz wrote:
             | Erdos took amphetamines, so he was cheating too.
        
               | btilly wrote:
               | He also co-authored most of his papers and offloaded a
               | lot of the writing to others.
               | 
               | But he really did play a significant role in getting the
               | results in every one of his papers.
        
         | nerdponx wrote:
         | This person is already writing an article in 2-3 days. Is
         | ChatGPT realy the problem, for reducing the time to 1 day?
        
           | freedomben wrote:
           | I think you have a good point, but you're probably getting
           | downvoted because on first read it came off more as you were
           | defending the use of chatgpt (rather than criticizing the
           | absurdly fast output).
           | 
           | Please correct me if I'm wrong, but you're pointing out the
           | absurdity of publishing every 2 to 3 days and implying that
           | it was already essentiallly garbage he was producing, and
           | chatgpt was just polishing the garbage (which IMHO, as you
           | stated, the garbage production is clearly the bigger problem,
           | not the polishing).
        
             | nerdponx wrote:
             | > you're pointing out the absurdity of publishing every 2
             | to 3 days and implying that it was already essentiallly
             | garbage he was producing
             | 
             | Yes, exactly.
        
         | malka wrote:
         | most papers are made of 90% of useless fluff, and 10% of meat.
        
         | CodexArcana wrote:
         | If the domain expert is there to audit the results, where is
         | the issue?
        
           | i_am_jl wrote:
           | I can't tell whether this is a question from someone who
           | didn't read the article, or whether this is the most meta
           | comment I've ever read.
        
             | belter wrote:
             | It could be both at the same time :-)
        
           | greenthrow wrote:
           | You're assuming they are going to do as thorough of a job
           | auditing as they'd do on their own writing. I doubt that's
           | what will happen when the point of the AI is to spew content
           | out faster.
        
         | brigadier132 wrote:
         | It depends on how he is using it. If he is using it to insert
         | new content into his papers it is concerning. If he is using it
         | to reword his papers but the content remains the same it's less
         | concerning.
        
           | KurtMueller wrote:
           | | If he is using it to reword his papers but the content
           | remains the same it's less concerning.
           | 
           | How is that less concerning? Rewording conclusions or the
           | abstract, even subtly, can change the meaning of those words
           | and of those sections.
        
             | Turing_Machine wrote:
             | I don't see how this would be much different from a non-
             | native English speaker getting a colleague to help with the
             | English phrasing of a paper (this is very, very common).
             | 
             | As long as the original researcher reads what's been
             | written, and agrees with it, and the output gives an
             | accurate description of the procedure and results, there's
             | no harm done that I can see.
             | 
             | Edit: I mean in general, not necessarily in this specific
             | case. This guy seems a little...questionable...for other
             | reasons.
        
               | simiones wrote:
               | > I don't see how this would be much different from a
               | non-native English speaker getting a colleague to help
               | with the English phrasing of a paper (this is very, very
               | common).
               | 
               | It's as different as ChatGPT is from an English-speaking
               | scientist colleague.
               | 
               | For example, a colleague will probably ask if they're not
               | sure which is the intended meaning of a phrase. ChatGPT
               | will generate one of the possible meanings.
        
               | em-bee wrote:
               | so what? the author can still proofread it and decide if
               | that was the right meaning.
        
               | Turing_Machine wrote:
               | Right. That's the author's responsibility, whether he or
               | she is using ChatGPT, a human colleague, an old-school
               | tool like Grammarly or classic Google Translate, or even
               | older-school tools like paper dictionaries.
               | 
               | In all those cases, mistakes can be made and unintended
               | meanings can creep in. The author has to check the
               | output, definitely, but that doesn't mean those tools
               | shouldn't be used at all.
        
               | ImPostingOnHN wrote:
               | the author can "proofread" it as written in another
               | language with which they're arguably unqualified to work
        
               | Turing_Machine wrote:
               | Okay, how is that different from them using a
               | (whatever)->English dictionary?
        
           | suddenclarity wrote:
           | It seems to be more than that:
           | 
           | > Magazinov mentioned that a non-existent "vegetative
           | electron microscopy" appears in two studies by Luque
           | published with Iranian colleagues.
        
             | belter wrote:
             | Well there are Electron Microscope studies of the
             | vegetative Cellular Life, so that is not the knife he will
             | fall on...
        
             | cwmoore wrote:
             | Is it unreasonable to surmise that vegetative electrons are
             | very small, thus the microscopy?
        
               | akiselev wrote:
               | The decision to turn off life support for vegetative
               | electrons was made at the first Solvay Conference in
               | 1911, at which point they ceased to exist in our universe
               | in a total wave function collapse. ChatGPT has apparently
               | overfitted on late 19th century theoretical physics
               | journals.
        
               | antonvs wrote:
               | But there's speculation that vegetative electrons may
               | still exist in the brains of the people who have been
               | peer reviewing these papers.
        
         | JumpCrisscross wrote:
         | Prolificness aside, what has he actually done? Is he advancing
         | chemistry or just co-signing dubious papers?
        
           | kevviiinn wrote:
           | Co-signing dubious papers
        
           | colechristensen wrote:
           | Seems like he was gaming the various academic ratings systems
           | by getting lots of things published with his name on them.
        
         | cornholio wrote:
         | It speaks to the broken state of measuring scientific and
         | academic output. It's 99% a charade, people churning out
         | machine generated papers nobody reads but get quoted in an
         | attempt to justify the inflated claims of other machine
         | generated garbage papers, in a circular attempt to fudge the
         | stats that decide the funding and promotion.
         | 
         | The idea that someone can even read, edit and make co-author
         | level contributions in papers aimed for a top-level journals,
         | all in the span of 37 hours, is utterly ridiculous.
         | 
         | It's basically the equivalent of SEO spamming the Page rank
         | algorithm with crummy pages with many back-links and repeated
         | search terms. The search optimized term here is the author's
         | name.
        
           | kevviiinn wrote:
           | From my experience most researchers don't actually read most
           | papers, we just don't have time. The figures are what tells
           | the real story, not necessarily the interpretation of the
           | authors.
        
             | EpiMath wrote:
             | I don't disagree with you, but this is a horribly sad
             | comment. I worry that the text of papers often gives short
             | shrift to nuance and subtlety that is necessary for
             | reasonable interpretation.
        
               | peterfirefly wrote:
               | I once read a lot of medical papers -- probably a few
               | hundreds. There was often no real connection between the
               | reported data and the conclusion. Sometimes the
               | conclusion was along the lines of "a weak relation
               | between X and Y was found" but the data showed a strong
               | relation. Sometimes it was the opposite. Sometimes the
               | conclusion was that X was good but the data showed X was
               | bad. Sometimes it was the opposite.
               | 
               | It was almost as if many of the authors couldn't do the
               | kind of math expected of high schoolers that apply to
               | university to study science.
               | 
               | My takeaway was 1) to deeply distrust doctors as
               | scientists (and as people who could think) and 2) mostly
               | ignore the text surrounding the tables and graphs and
               | just go straight to the data.
        
               | kevviiinn wrote:
               | Physicians are definitely not scientists, at least the
               | majority of MDs. MD is not a research degree, it's a
               | memorization degree
        
           | queuebert wrote:
           | Modern academia incentivizes quantity over quality, and
           | reviewers for all but the most prestigious journals don't
           | have sufficient time or expertise to properly review
           | submitted papers. So this does not surprise me.
        
           | cwmoore wrote:
           | Why maximize paperclips when terms like "vegetative electron
           | microscopy" could be trending in the literature.
        
             | DoctorOetker wrote:
             | For those who didn't read the article, or for those who
             | did, but didn't follow its link to the PubPeer thread
             | containing the "vegetative electron microscopy"
             | observation:
             | 
             | https://pubpeer.com/publications/7C9F0CCD493B1129135A3A918B
             | 0...
             | 
             | Search the page for the term and you'll see the relevant
             | comment.
             | 
             | The term seems to stem from an OCR cluster-mishap, where a
             | valid scientific document was once OCR'ed incorrectly. The
             | page has 2 columns of text and the left column has a
             | running sentence 'ending' with "vegetative" before
             | continuing on the next line in the same column. But at the
             | same height in the column on the right a sentence
             | continues, visually starting with "electron microscopy".
             | 
             | The term is entirely meaningless in the field.
             | 
             | This isn't just "using a little ChatGPT to brush up my
             | English" at all.
             | 
             | Other comments point out that the contents of abstract and
             | article don't even match, the abstract being about bacteria
             | but the article contents about gene delivery...
             | 
             | I don't need convincing that ML will have tremendous
             | positive impact in math and science disciplines, it's
             | obvious, but the way ML was used in this case is not a
             | defensible usage.
        
               | roundandround wrote:
               | Yeah, from the article I get the sense that he is often
               | agreeing to add his name to papers for network affect,
               | perhaps even as the main author.. So his own criteria for
               | what he writes may be factual, but seems a bit off topic
               | for what a reader should expect on seeing his name.
        
           | JTbane wrote:
           | TBH I'm terrified of the double-whammy effect of researchers
           | becoming less and less competent as AI takes the reins (a la
           | Wall-E) and good science getting drowned out by crap.
        
         | AraceliHarker wrote:
         | If you read the whole article, that's not because Rafael Luque
         | was using ChatGPT to churn out papers, but because he was
         | lending his name to research papers done in Saudi Arabia and
         | Chinese universities.
        
           | JumpCrisscross wrote:
           | > _that 's not because Rafael Luque was using ChatGPT to
           | churn out papers, but because he was lending his name to
           | research papers done in Saudi Arabia and Chinese
           | universities_
           | 
           | ...who were using even worse models to churn out papers about
           | "vegetative electron microscopy."
        
           | Alifatisk wrote:
           | I am aware of that and did not state otherwise, I just had to
           | point it out. I even said "even if this is unrelated to the
           | story"...
        
         | anigbrowl wrote:
         | _I found this part quite impressive until I read the following
         | part:_
         | 
         | If that first stat didn't pin your bullshit detectors into the
         | red, you need new bullshit detectors.
        
         | belter wrote:
         | Mostly is _publishing_ by being co-author:
         | https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4190-1916
        
         | marcosdumay wrote:
         | I'll go one step further than the sibling. For every possible
         | occupation, if chatGPT can improve your odds of success (except
         | maybe for writing fiction, but I'd guess it's bad at this too),
         | then there is something fundamentally wrong with that
         | occupation.
        
           | lazyasciiart wrote:
           | This is nonsense. You might as well say "if literacy can
           | improve your odds of success, then there is something
           | fundamentally wrong with that occupation".
        
         | outside1234 wrote:
         | I'm doing this too on a paragraph level. It is amazing how much
         | better my writing is getting with a tutor.
         | 
         | It is entirely unsurprising that a non-native writer would do
         | this. It would be more surprising in five years that anyone is
         | not doing this.
        
         | geoelectric wrote:
         | GPT is pretty reliable at taking an existing body of text that
         | fits entirely in a prompt and doing something with it--reword,
         | translate, answer questions about it, so forth. Even expanding
         | an outline into written sentences usually works great as long
         | as the outline has _all_ the detail.
         | 
         | It's really only when you let it introduce "facts" based on its
         | body of training that it'll start going off the rails. If he's
         | just running text through without checking the final results,
         | that's really not wise, but the LLM is unlikely to start
         | introducing novel facts or changing figures in response to a
         | conservative request based entirely on the prompt text.
         | 
         | Using it as a writing aid the way he claims he is (not that I
         | necessarily believe all his claims) is probably one of the more
         | responsibles way to use GPT, honestly, because you have full
         | opportunity and ability to vet the output. Hack together
         | something that has all the right content, then make it readable
         | with the AI engine the way you might with a human editor
         | collaborating, while jointly making sure the editor doesn't
         | change the actual facts of the content.
         | 
         | Whether or not he could be hacking anything of value together
         | every 37 hours is another story.
        
       | n0tahacker wrote:
       | I am not a scientist in this field and can not evaluate the
       | quality of his studies. But if you let ChatGPT do the "non-
       | scientific" work, this seems to be okay to me. Also, I think that
       | with the time there will be better mechanisms for evaluating
       | studies/scientists as generating spam will be easier. But
       | nonetheless, I think these rankings don't fulfill a scientific
       | need. A scientific discovery can be important, but that doesn't
       | mean anyone recognizes that.
        
       | alsetmusic wrote:
       | > The university has sanctioned Luque for working as a researcher
       | at other centers, such as the King Saud University in Riyadh and
       | the Peoples' Friendship University of Russia in Moscow, despite
       | holding a full-time publicly funded contract with the Spanish
       | institution.
       | 
       | ChatGPT is getting cited in comments, but this is the real lede.
        
         | LadyCailin wrote:
         | While concerning, this seems to be the least bad thing this guy
         | does.
        
           | kevviiinn wrote:
           | So which is the most bad
        
             | leoh wrote:
             | Spammy papers
        
       | jonnycomputer wrote:
       | >"They have a grudge against me because I am a very prolific
       | scientist and a lot of people adore me, because they know my
       | worth. They are envious and mediocre people," he said. "I have
       | never felt supported by the University of Cordoba, even though I
       | put it on the Shanghai ranking. Being on the ranking is entirely
       | due to me."
       | 
       | He appears to have a very high opinion of himself.
        
       | pvaldes wrote:
       | Another for the list of recent scandals of scientists publishing
       | faster than light
       | 
       | Susana Gonzalez, lost an EU grant of 1.8 million euro in 2017:
       | https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms14006
       | 
       | The wistleblower that disclosed that there were problems with the
       | data and found images manipulated was fired and unable to find
       | other work in research. Maybe is unemployed still, dunno.
       | Somebody saved a lot of money also.
        
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