THE CASE OF THE AI-GENERATED GIANT RAT PENIS

HOW DID AN OBVIOUSLY FABRICATED ARTICLE END UP IN A PEER-REVIEWED JOURNAL?

- RONALD BAILEY

AN ILLUSTRATION FEATURING a rat with a cross section of a giant penis set off a firestorm of criticism about the use of generative artificial intelligence based on large language models (LLMs) in scientific publishing. The bizarre illustration was embellished with nonsense labels, including one fortuitously designated as “dck.” The article on rat testes stem cells had undergone peer review and editorial vetting before being published in February by Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology.

“Mayday,” blared longtime AI researcher and critic Gary Marcus on X (formerly known as Twitter). Vexed by AI’s ability to abet the “exponential enshittification of science,” he added, “the sudden pollution of science with LLM-generated content, known to yield plausible-sounding but sometimes difficult to detect errors (‘hallucinations’) is serious, and its impact will be lasting.”

A February 2024 article in