Flagging suspect publications and crowdsourcing post-publication reassessments: the ‘Problematic Paper Screener’

Probabilistic text generators have been used to produce fake scientific papers for more than a decade. Now more complex AI-powered generation techniques produce texts indistinguishable from that of humans and the generation of scientific texts starting from a few keywords used as input has been documented. Our study introduces the concept of tortured phrases: unexpected weird phrases in lieu of established ones, such as ‘counterfeit consciousness’ instead of ‘artificial intelligence.’ Hypothesising the use of advanced language models we ran a detector on the abstracts of recent articles and on several control sets.