Publisherballs
Private Eye has a regular feature called “Commentatorballs” which contains various verbal gaffes perpetrated by sports commentators, usually sent in by members of the public. It used to be called “Colemanballs” after David Coleman, but the name was changed after he passed away in 2013. Years ago, I had a couple of my own contributions published, actually.
Anyway, I’m seriously thinking about running a similar feature on this blog devoted to outrageous blunders made by academic publishers.
Here’s one that would make a good entry in “Publisherballs” from the journal Radiology Case Reports, published by – you guessed it – Elsevier:
On the left you see the title, author data and abstract and on the right an extract from the text that clearly shows it was generated by ChatGPT or some other AI bot. The authors cut and pasted the output without even noticing that the software they were using was explaining it could not respond to the prompt they gave it. Clearly the careful editorial process at the journal didn’t even go as far as reading the paper…
In the Dark 
January 26, 2025 at 9:01 pm
Another finally retracted example: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2468023024002402
January 26, 2025 at 10:36 pm
O to see the emails between the authors once it was published!
February 4, 2025 at 1:03 pm
The high quality of this AI-generated sonnet did rather put the breeze up me regarding what it can do:
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/feb/01/deepseek-chatgpt-grok-gemini-claude-meta-ai-which-is-the-best-ai-assistant-we-put-them-to-the-test/
Universities are going to have to revert to examinations.
January 27, 2025 at 5:12 pm
Lol, the Art of copying and pasting is alive and kicking outside the software developer world.