Appall and scorn ripped through scientists' social media networks Thursday as several egregiously bad AI-generated figures circulated from a peer-reviewed article recently published in a reputable journal. Those figures—which the authors acknowledge in the article's text were made by Midjourney—are all uninterpretable. They contain gibberish text and, most strikingly, one includes an image of a rat with grotesquely large and bizarre genitals, as well as a text label of "dck."
A dck pck, if you will.
Count me among the "some scientists online" who "questioned whether the text was also AI-generated". I mean, it's a disjointed mess. Right off, we get this:
The term “stem cell” was first coined in 1901 by Regaud
Um, no. But if that could be taken for human error, what about a sentence like this:
They were physically sheared and digested with a solution of DnaseI, hyaluronidase, collagenase, and trypsin using a two-step enzymatic digestion method in which the digestive enzymes included DnaseI, hyaluronidase, collagenase, and trypsin.
Just a bit before that, the text does a swerve into what sounds like a specific experiment, which doesn't fit with its surroundings and is very strange in a review article. My guess is the whole thing was made by stitching together LLM responses.
The publisher, Frontiers Media, is not exactly held in high regard overall.
Frontiers Media is the second entry of the "don't cite this BS" list for Wikipedia.