>”…in 2015, 1.2 million people kicked the bucket from kidney dissatisfaction, a development of 32% since…”
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C38&q=%22...
In statistics: "tendency score matching" https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22t...
The students were using ChatGPT and thought they would trick the teacher by editing some typos in before submission.
The cheating market is moving fast. There are now tools you can use to rephrase LLM generated output until the Pangram score drops low enough.
Versions of this cat and mouse game have been going on for a long time. Before ChatGPT was a household name there was a market for simple paraphrasing tools that spammers would use to send variations of email text to try to delay pattern matching spam filters.
https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Handbook-of-Kidney...
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=kidney+disappo...
Wolters Kluwer seems to be a real multinational company?
<quote> Have you ever heard of the Joined Together States? Or bosom peril? Kidney disappointment? Fake neural organizations? Lactose bigotry? These nonsensical, and sometimes amusing, word sequences are among thousands of “tortured phrases” that sleuths have found littered throughout reputable scientific journals.
They typically result from using paraphrasing tools to evade plagiarism-detection software when stealing someone else’s text. The phrases above are real examples of bungled synonyms for the United States, breast cancer, kidney failure, artificial neural networks, and lactose intolerance, respectively. </quote>
“Subsequently, 1 mL of the mass killing of an ethnic group was opposed to 20 mL of the skin sample and unprotected to light for 7 min.”
From: https://bsky.app/profile/forbetterscience.bsky.social/post/3...
I found [1], created all the way back in 2021, which seems to first introduce this "kidney disappointment" term, and I would have to assume that perhaps the authors preferred to translate it from their native language.
LLMs did not exist in their current form in 2021, so couldn't have used it to write down a coherent thought, let alone a paper, at the time.
At the same time, I do live in the same country as the authors, and while we don't speak the best English, being a student at a college without some familiarity of the English language to come up with the term "kidney disappointment" is, let's just say, hard to believe for me.
Edit: This other comment[2] made me realize what it might have been: plagiarism avoidance.
Unfortunately, many colleges here do not have the best reputation and often run like degree mills, and the aforementioned comment made me remember a conversation with a friend, who mentioned writing a review paper.
Again, LLMs were not really a thing at the time, so they mentioned how they had to run their paper through a plagiarism detection tool, and then they substituted words with their synonyms. I guess someone really did search for the word "failure" and found "disappointment" as an alternative.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Suprodip-Mandal/publica...
Plagiarism has turned the to pushing out blatant slop. People gaming the system. Diluting the pool of real research.
Suddenly security was announcing "There's been a sanitary inconvenience, everyone must leave the pool!!! We apologize, but there's been a sanitary inconvenience!".
A moment later we saw them scooping up some floating poop that had escape some baby's swim diaper.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?&q=%22renal+disappointmen...
https://www.sciencealert.com/a-strange-phrase-keeps-turning-...
https://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/vegetative-electron...
"
At some point an earlier find-and-replace swapped "act" for "Law" and garbled three real words. As written, the text says:
Section 1: "cookie-banner Lawions" — should be actions
Section 3(2)(b): "next ordinary feature update after enLawment" — should be enactment
Section 5(5): "a site-specific Law that the signal cannot satisfy" — should be act (or action)
These aren't stylistic quibbles; "Lawions" landing on the desks of four legal departments would cause real confusion about intent. The fix is a single reverse find-and-replace. With that correction, I'm comfortable signing.
"
In engineering literature from Russia from the 1960s, one sometimes finds references to a ‘water goat’ in papers that are otherwise about heavy machinery. It turns out this is a twice-translated rendition of ‘hydraulic ram’.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22f...
Guess why the acronym doesn't match. It's called chronic kidney disease (CKD). Yeah the acronym is wrong too.
I think (heard) some used to translate an article back and forth a few times to get a "new" article, but maybe it could have been some kind of "paraphrasing" software like you describe (but for avoiding plagiarism detection rather than repetitions).
Conterfeit Consciousness is gonna be the name of my new post-liquid analog modular synth IDM project.
I feel like these text spinners could actually be an untapped gold mine for creatively naming things.
Oh, that's where it comes from!
My dad told me something close when I was a kid, but according to him it was the early EU doing dictionary translation between English and French and getting "water sheep". I never could find it.
Through an unrelated anecdote, in my head this is now bound to the music of "smoke on the water", with a sheep impression for the guitar (bass?) — "Sheep on the water, ba baa baaah, ba ba ba baaah"
And SCIgen was generating bullshit papers that actually managed to be published in 2005: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCIgen
The only solution is to evaluate students in ways that they can't cheat. Hand-written exams in class, oral exams, etc. but that is quite time-consuming and most teachers at least in K-12 are already overloaded.
“kissed the wall” was replaced with
“lost re-election”
in all the corpus I’m trying to use as training material right now
This seems more plausible to me. "Bosom peril" is not in any way a synonym for cancer. But if you think 'cancer' as a word will trigger people then softening it with 'peril' makes sense.
Funnily enough, your first link reports that the author of the book is "Kluwer, Wolters".
Being a real multinational company doesn't mean they've read the books published under their imprint.
A few of my favorites are "counterfeit consciousness" (artificial intelligence), "discourse acknowledgement" (voice recognition), and "arbitrary get right of passage to memory" (random access memory).
Such translations were not unusual.
Around 2017 to 2019 I used a lot "Google translate", because it saved time despite its flaws, but there never was even a single sentence that I could let exactly as generated by "Google translate".
In each sentence I had to change at least a word or two, and many were hilarious. This was for translations between English and German. I assume that for other more distant languages the translations must have been much worse.
* current LLMs work by choosing next likely token, with a small randomization built in (emulating how humans sometimes substitute words)
* one implementation of the text marking is to "rig" the dice roll above, but do that on based upon a certain key
* so by looking at word substitutions in text, you can use a key verify it was generated by an llm.
* the algo is designed not to substitute proper nouns and some other asterisks... no idea if it's deterministic or not.
So yes, this is completely possible and even fits what happened.
My favourite example of troubled blind translation is still "naked conductor runs under the carriage".
Similarly, I find its AI tab useless because it has a hard time interpreting search phrasing. If I need to reword it I might as well switch to a chatbot.
It's just an old plagiarism method
I personally would like the law I linked to be followed. I sent a copy to the major browser makers and left this suggestion:
https://connect.mozilla.org/t5/ideas/comply-with-choose-cook...
where it got 1 kudos from a community manager but no other upvotes or comments.
The announcement of the law here on HN (linked in my gp comment) got 2 upvotes and no comments. So a couple of people liked the idea, but it's not a big hit.
It works because so many academic journals are write-only media. The only things that actually "read" the papers are machines that check for plagiarism, compute citation counts and do other things used to decide on academic promotions. So it doesn't matter if the text is nonsensical.
And the tools work for spam, the original use case, because people who want to buy Viagra from spam mails don't care if they have to read weird English, they just want to find the web shops. Works great for bypassing keyword and Bayesian filters though.
Some papers show signs of being generated by context-free grammars or random phrase combination as well.
These papers are often being produced by "paper mills" that bulk generate fake studies and sell them to academics, who use them to get promoted without having to do any real research.
I wrote an article about the problem years ago if you want to learn more:
https://dailysceptic.org/2021/10/03/436-randomly-generated-p...
The general working theory is that these phrases are the result of a "text spinner" tool being applied to a manuscript and blindly replacing random words or phrases using a preset list of synonyms (which are often imprecise and/or inappropriate). https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.06751 found that many of the commonly observed phrases were characteristic of an online text-spinning tool.
Changing words for watermarking .. I understand why it may do that .. but .. what an unfortunate choice of where to do it.
Update: looking at some of these, I think it is probably just poor machine translation.
Wouldn't that mean that checking the watermark...
(1) Required knowing the prompt used to generate the text; and
(2) was just as expensive as generating the text?
"Regularly, it's more irritating than it is not kidding..."
(Pal and Gautam 2018)
