Which is worse:
a) p-hacking and suppressing null results
b) hallucinations
c) falsifying data
Would be cool to see an analysis of this
a) p-hacking and suppressing null results
b) hallucinations
c) falsifying data
Would be cool to see an analysis of this
To me, it's no different than stealing a car or tricking an old lady into handing over her fidelity account. You are stealing, and society says stealing is a criminal act.
EDIT - The threshold amount varies. Sometimes it's as low as a few hundred dollars. However, the point stands on its own, because there's no universe where the sum in question is in misdemeanor territory.
Most institutions aren't very chill with grant money being misused, so we already don't need to burden then state with getting Johnny muncipal prosecutor to try and figure out if gamma crystallization imaging sources were incorrect.
If you're taking public funds (directly or otherwise) with the intent to either:
A) Do little to no real work, and pass of the work of an AI as being your own work, or
B) Knowingly publish falsified data
Then you are, without a single shred of doubt, in criminal fraud territory. Further, the structural damage you inflict when you do the above is orders of magnitude greater than the initial fraud itself. That is a matter for civil courts ("Our company based on development on X fraudulent data, it cost us Y in damages").
Whether or not charges are pressed is going to happen way after all the internal reviews have demonstrated the person being charged has gone beyond the "honest mistake" threshold. It's like Walmart not bothering to call the cops until you're into felony territory, there's no point in doing so.
If they actually committed theft, well then that already is illegal too.
But right now, doing "shitty research" isn't illegal and it's unlikely it ever will be.
If you do a search for "contractor imprisoned for fraud" you'll find plenty of cases where a private contract dispute resulted in criminal convictions for people who took money and then didn't do the work.
I don't know if taking money and then merely pretending to do the research would rise to the level of criminal fraud, but it doesn't seem completely outlandish.
You gotta horse trade if you want to win. Take one for the team or get out of the way.
You don't need to be in academia to understand that scientific progress depends on trust. If you don't trust the results people are publishing, you can't then build upon them. Reproducibility has been a known issue for a long time[0], and is widely agreed upon to be a 'crisis' by academics[1].
The advent of an easier way to publish correct-looking papers, or to plagiarize and synthesize other works without actually validating anything is only going to further diminish trust.
[0] https://www.nature.com/articles/533452a#citeas
[1] https://journals.plos.org/plosbiology/article?id=10.1371/jou...