↓Skip to main content

The article I didn't write

Meta

I am writing an article1 on genetics of wood properties and slowly doing a literature review when I can set a little time aside. After looking in academic databases (Scopus and Google Scholar2) I did a Google search, thinking “perhaps people wrote something outside journals and conferences”. Besides the typical junk results, there was the AI summary, which I usually ignore. However, this time I was curious, clicked on it and ended up in a Gemini session.

I tried to describe what I wanted and Gemini replied explaining me the topic. No, I want journal articles. I got a link to one useful one, but with the wrong authors, and three made up ones. Nothing new here: LLM are designed to make up answers. However, the following article caught my attention, because I did not remember writing it and I was supposed to be the first author!

Strange how software can undermine reality. I remember all the promise of the late 1990s Google search field; now it’s a dumpster fire of misinformation and disinformation.

Two Spiderman meme: each one pointing out the other one

  1. I take ages writing articles, I think of the problem, meditate it and it may take 5 years to see the light. On top of that, I don’t like to write using a template. ↩︎

  2. “Academic” between quotes, of course. It’s full of repeated papers, wrong attributions, etc. ↩︎