Academics Lead and Student Follow: Is AI Far Behind?
July 16, 2025
Just a dinobaby without smart software. I am sufficiently dull without help from smart software.
I read “Positive Review Only: Researchers Hide AI Prompts in Papers.” Note: You may have to pay to read this write up.] Who knew that those writing objective, academic-type papers would cheat? I know that one ethics professor is probably okay with the idea. Plus, that Stanford University president is another one who would say, “Sounds good to me.”
The write up says:
Nikkei looked at English-language preprints — manuscripts that have yet to undergo formal peer review — on the academic research platform arXiv. It discovered such prompts in 17 articles, whose lead authors are affiliated with 14 institutions including Japan’s Waseda University, South Korea’s KAIST, China’s Peking University and the National University of Singapore, as well as the University of Washington and Columbia University in the U.S. Most of the papers involve the field of computer science.
Now I would like suggest that commercial database documents are curated and presumably less likely to contain made up information. I cannot. Peer reviewed papers also contain some slick moves; for example, a loose network of academic friends can cite one another’s papers to boost them in search results. Others like the Harvard ethics professor just write stuff and let it sail through the review process fabrications and whatever other confections were added to the alternative fact salads.
What US schools featured in this study? The University of Washington and Columbia University. I want to point out that the University of Washington has contributed to the Google brain trust; for example, Dr. Jeff Dean.
Several observations:
- Why should students pay attention to the “rules” of academic conduct when university professors ignore them?
- Have universities given up trying to enforce guidelines for appropriate academic behavior? On the other hand, perhaps these ArXiv behaviors are now the norm when grants may be in balance?
- Will wider use of smart software change the academics’ approach to scholarly work?
Perhaps one of these estimable institutions will respond to these questions?
Stephen E Arnold, July 16, 2025
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