Skip to content

ACN - 101321555 | ABN - 39101321555

Australasian Human Research Ethics Consultancy Services Pty Ltd (AHRECS)

AHRECS icon
  • Home
  • About Us
    • Consultants
    • Services
  • Previous Projects
  • Blog
  • Resources
  • Feeds
  • Contact Us
  • More
    • Request a Quote
    • Susbcribe to REM
    • Subscribe to VIP
Menu
  • Home
  • About Us
    • Consultants
    • Services
  • Previous Projects
  • Blog
  • Resources
  • Feeds
  • Contact Us
  • More
    • Request a Quote
    • Susbcribe to REM
    • Subscribe to VIP
Exclude terms...
Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
AHRECS
Analysis
Animal ethics
Animal Ethics Committee
Animal handling
Animal housing
Animal Research Ethics
Animal Welfare
ANZCCART
Artificial Intelligence
Arts
Australia
Authorship
Belief
Beneficence
Big data
Big data
Biobank
Bioethics
Biomedical
Biospecimens
Breaches
Cartoon/Funny
Case studies
Clinical trial
Collaborative research
Conflicts of interest
Consent
Controversy/Scandal
Controversy/Scandal
Creative
Culture
Data management
Database
Dual-use
Essential Reading
Ethical review
Ethnography
Euthanasia
Evaluative practice/quality assurance
Even though i
First People
Fraud
Gender
Genetics
Get off Gary Play man of the dog
Good practice
Guidance
Honesty
HREC
Human research ethics
Humanities
Institutional responsibilities
International
Journal
Justice
Links
Media
Medical research
Merit and integrity
Methodology
Monitoring
New Zealand
News
Online research
Peer review
Performance
Primary materials
Principles
Privacy
Protection for participants
Psychology
Publication ethics
Questionable Publishers
Research ethics committees
Research integrity
Research Misconduct
Research results
Researcher responsibilities
Resources
Respect for persons
Sample paperwork
sd
se
Serious Adverse Event
Social Science
SoTL
Standards
Supervision
Training
Vulnerability
What was that say
x
Young people
Exclude news

Sort by

Animal Ethics Biosafety Human Research Ethics Research Integrity

Thanks to generative AI, catching fraud science is going to be this much harder – The Register (Katyanna Quach | March 2023)

Posted by Connar Allen in Research Integrity on March 24, 2023
Keywords: Publication ethics, Research Misconduct, Research results, Researcher responsibilities

The Linked Original Item was Posted On March 11, 2023

The word "FRAUD" lifted and coloured amongst words relating to its investigation

Generative AI poses interesting challenges for academic publishers tackling fraud in science papers as the technology shows the potential to fool human peer review.

We are you may already be in that dystopian future, but we surely cannot be far away from artificial intelligence language models empowering dishonest researchers to turn text instructions into false but entirely believable images that are almost impossible to detect.  Seeing may no longer be believing.  Scientific proof maybe end up being something we all end up doubting.

Describe an image for DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney, and they’ll generate one in seconds. These text-to-picture systems have rapidly improved over the past few years, and what initially began as a research prototype, producing benign and wonderfully bizarre illustrations of baby daikon radishes walking dogs in 2021, has since morphed into commercial software, built by billion-dollar companies, capable of generating increasingly realistic images.

These AI models can produce lifelike pictures of human faces, objects, and scenes, and it’s a matter of time before they get good at creating convincing scientific images and data, too. Text-to-image models are now widely accessible, pretty cheap to use, and they could help dodgy scientists forge results and publish sham research more easily.

Image manipulation is already a top concern for academic publishers as it’s the most common form of scientific misconduct of late. Authors can use all sorts of tricks, such as flipping, rotating, or cropping parts of the same image to fake findings. Editors are fooled into believing the results being presented are real and will publish the work.

Catching scientfic fraud could get a lot harder thanks to AI
Why do experiments and all that work when a model could just invent convincing data for you?

Related Reading

A.I. Like ChatGPT Is Revealing the Insidious Disease at the Heart of Our Scientific Process – Slate (Charles Seife | January 2023)

(US) Image manipulation in science is suddenly in the news. But these cases are hardly rare – Stat (Adam Marcus & Ivan Oransky | December 2022)

AI paper mills and image generation require a co-ordinated response from academic publishers – LSE (Rebecca Lawrence & Sabina Alam | December 2022)

Journals adopt AI to spot duplicated images in manuscripts – Nature (Richard Van Noorden | December 2021)

Is AI really helpful in spotting doctored images in manuscripts? – AIM (Avi Gopani | December 2021)

How a grad school assignment led me to a career investigating research misconduct – Science (Julia Behnfeldt | November 2021)

“Fabulous document”, “very helpful guidance”: Sleuths react to recommendations for handling image integrity issues – Retraction Watch (Ivan Oransky | September 2021)

How a Sharp-Eyed Scientist Became Biology’s Image Detective – The New Yorker (Ingfei Chen | June 2021)

New tool looks for signs of image doctoring – Retraction Watch interview (Alison McCook | March 2018)

(Australian case) Images used in biomedical articles suspected of manipulation – The Australian (John Ross | February 2018)

(Hong Kong) Author admits to manipulating more than a dozen images in 2013 paper – Retraction Watch (Victoria Stern | August 2017)

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

Related Links

Complaints against Research Ethics Monthly

Request a Takedown

Submission Guidelines

About the Research Ethics Monthly

About subscribing to the Research Ethics Monthly

A diverse group discussing a topic

Random selected image from the AHRECS library. These were all purchased from iStockPhoto. These are images we use in our workshops and Dr Allen used in the GUREM.

Research Ethics Monthly Receive copies of the Research Ethics Monthly directly
by email. We will never spam you.

  • Enter the answer as a word
  • Hidden
    This field is hidden and only used for import to Mailchimp
  • This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.
  • Home
  • Services
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Home
  • Services
  • About Us
  • Contact Us
  • Company
  • Terms Of Use
  • Copyright
  • Privacy Policy
  • Company
  • Terms Of Use
  • Copyright
  • Privacy Policy
  • Site Map
  • Site Map

Australasian Human Research Ethics Consultancy Services Pty Ltd (AHRECS)

Facebook-f Twitter Linkedin-in