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Comment by ai_critic | Hacker News Reader

Anybody else notice that half the video was just finding papers to decorate the bibliography with? Not like "find me more papers I should read and consider", but "find papers that are relevant that I should cite--okay, just add those".

This is all pageantry.

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Yes. That part of the video was straight-up "here's how to automate academic fraud". Those papers could just as easily negate one of your assumptions. What even is research if it's not using cited works?

"I know nothing but had an idea and did some work. I have no clue whether this question has been explored or settled one way or another. But here's my new paper claiming to be an incremental improvement on... whatever the previous state of understanding was. I wouldn't know, I haven't read up on it yet. Too many papers to write."

It's as if it's marketed to the students who have been using ChatGPT for the last few years to pass courses and now need to throw together a bachelor's thesis. Bibliography and proper citation requirements are a pain.

I agree with this. This problem is only going to get worse once these people enter academia and facing needing to publish.

That is such a bummer. At the time, it was annoying and I groused and grumbled about it; but in hindsight my reviewers pointed me toward some good articles, and I am better for having read them.

I've noticed this pattern, and it really drives me nuts. You should really be doing a comprehensive literature review before starting any sort of review or research paper.

We removed the authorship of a a former co-author on a paper I'm on because his workflow was essentially this--with AI generated text--and a not-insignificant amount of straight-up plagiarism.

There is definitely a difference between how senior researchers and students go about making publications. To students, they get told basically what topic they should write a paper on or prepare data for, so they work backwards: try to write the paper (possibly some researching information to write the paper), then add references because they know they have to. For the actual researchers, it would be a complete waste of time/funding to start a project on a question that has already been answered before (and something that the grant reviewers are going to know has already been explored before), so in order to not waste their own time, they have to do what you said and actually conduct a comprehensive literature review before even starting the work.

Plus, this practice (just inserting AI-proposed citations/sources) is what has recently been the front-runner of some very embarrassing "editing" mistakes, notably in reports from public institutions. Now OpenAI lets us do pageantry even faster! <3

It's all performance over practice at this point. Look to the current US administration as the barometer by which many are measuring their public perceptions

The hand-drawn diagram to LaTeX is a little embarrassing. If you load up Prism and create your first blank project you can see the image. It looks like it's actually a LaTeX rendering of a diagram rendered with a hand-dawn style and then overlayed on a very clean image of a napkin. So you've proven that you can go from a rasterized LaTeX diagram back to equivalent LaTeX code. Interesting but probably will not hold up when it meets real world use cases.

I chuckled at that part too!

Didn't even open a single one of the papers to look at them! Just said that one is not relevant without even opening it.

A more apt example would have been to show finding a particular paper you want to cite, but you don’t want to be bothered searching your reference manager or Google Scholar.

E.g. “cite that paper from John Doe on lorem ipsum, but make sure it’s the 2022 update article that I cited in one of my other recent articles, not the original article”

You may notice that this is the way writing papers works in undergraduate courses. It's just another in a long line of examples of MBA tech bros gleaning an extremely surface-level understanding of a topic, then decided they're experts.

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