Summarised by Centrist
Frontiers, a major scientific journal faced embarrassment after publishing a fabricated paper purportedly authored by Chinese researchers. The paper, featuring AI-generated images of a rat with an exaggerated penis and four testacles, was retracted after those reading the published report online flagged its absurd content. The images, created using AI tools depicted nonexistent and nonsensical biological terms and systems.
Adrian Liston, a professor at Cambridge University, cautioned that distinguishing genuine articles from fraudulent ones may become increasingly difficult.
Editor’s note: Research fraud is a growing issue, but this is an absurd case, which should have been very easy to spot if there really was a robust peer review process, as Frontiers boasts. The process is described on their site but maybe it is an issue of not following your own instructions.
