Technology

This is the best summary I could come up with:

As Retraction Watch reports, Natural History Museum of Denmark myriapodologist Henrik Enghoff suspected the authors of the paper from China and Africa used OpenAI's ChatGPT to dig up academic references — and as it turns out, his hunch was right.

The offending paper was initially taken down by Preprints.org, a preprint archive run by the academic publisher MDPI, in June after Enghoff's colleague, the University of Copenhagen's David Richard Nash, notified editors of the errors.

Earlier this year, reporters at The Guardian noticed that the AI chatbot even made up entire articles with bylines of journalists who had never written these non-existent pieces.

"We will withdraw it immediately and add the authors of this preprint to our blacklist," Preprints.org's editor Lloyd Shu told Nash in an email back in June.

Kahsay Tadesse Mawcha of Aksum University in Ethiopia, who was originally listed as a corresponding author on the offending preprint, admitted to Danish newspaper Weekendavisen back in July that he indeed used ChatGPT, adding that he only realized later that the tool was "not recommended" for the task.

Powerful but flawed AI tools like ChatGPT are a bull in a china shop of almost every knowledge domain, academia included — and it'll be fascinating to watch everybody involved try to find a new sense of equilibrium.

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