artificial intelligence – Retraction Watch

The first of three themes for next year’s World Conference on Research Integrity will be the risks and benefits of artificial intelligence for research integrity. In an ironic and possibly predictable turn of events, the conference has received “an unusually large proportion” of off-topic abstracts that show signs of being written by generative AI.

The call for abstracts for the conference, set for May in Vancouver, closed a month ago. Last week, peer reviewers received an email with “URGENT” in the subject line.

“If you haven’t already reviewed the 9th WCRI abstracts that have been allocated to you, please take note of the following,” the email read. “We’ve received several signals that an unusually large proportion of the abstracts are completely off-topic and might have been written by some form of generative AI.”

The university ethics committee that reviewed a controversial study that deployed AI-generated posts on a Reddit forum made recommendations the researchers did not heed, Retraction Watch has learned.

The principal investigator on the study has received a formal warning, and the university’s ethics committees will implement a more rigorous review process for future studies, a university official said.

As we reported yesterday, researchers at the University of Zurich tested whether a large language model, or LLM, can persuade people to change their minds by posting messages on the Reddit subforum r/ChangeMyView (CMV). The moderators of the forum notified the subreddit about the study and their interactions with the researchers in a post published April 26.

Category: artificial intelligence

Research integrity conference hit with AI-generated abstracts

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