A Scene from the AI Flooding of Academic Journals

“We recently received a double-digit number of submissions from authors in the Far East… where we had strong evidence of machine generated content. Nothing made much sense in these papers, the authors, with their yahoo and aol type email addresses, frequently supplied false university affiliations, among other glaring problems. I suspected that these submissions were a test of our detection systems more so than anything else.” That is Udo Schuklenk, professor of philosophy at Queen’s University, writing in his capacity as one of the editors of the journal, Bioethics. His editorial was prompted by his journal’s publication of a critique of an article in the Journal of Medical Ethics (JME) for, among other things, multiple citations to “bibliographic fictions” (seemingly the result of unacknowledged AI use), which led to the latter article’s retraction. The now-retracted JME article is “Panem, corticoids and circenses: the ethical fallout of Enhanced Games,” by Alexis Demas (who,…