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A scientific journal has to admit with shame that three AI-generated illustrations contain complete nonsense.
With amazement and hanging legs, a rat looks at its penis, so big that it doesn’t even fit in the illustration. The rat has four testes, one of which is larger than its head. The image shows nonsense like ‘iollotte serotgomar cell’. Another image explains “immouminomuduodiuilatiuciaton,” a non-existent word that requires two Scrabble boards.
Three images that appeared last week in the journal Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology appear to have been made with the AI program Midjourney. The authors, three employees of the Honghui Hospital in Xi’an, China, made no secret of this. This is also allowed according to the publisher’s guidelines.
But what is remarkable is that the nonsensical images were published while the article was being proofread by two independent academics and the publisher. “We can have a good laugh with these images,” writes microbiologist Elisabeth Bik on her blog, where she regularly denounces image manipulation in scientific papers. But for her it mainly illustrates how naive the academic world is about the nonsense that AI spews out. “Generative AI will seriously harm the quality, reliability and value of scientific articles.”
“Not my job”
The scientific journal retracted the article last Friday, three days after it appeared online. The brief explanation states that one of the reviewers expressed concern about the illustrations and requested a revision. “The authors failed to meet that demand,” says the umbrella publisher. One of the two academics tasked with reviewing the work argued to Motherboard that it was not his job to review the images.
Frontiers publishes more than a hundred magazines that always start with ‘Frontiers in’, followed by the field. The Swiss publishing house was already under fire for its poor academic testing.
