Appall and scorn ripped through scientists’ social media networks Thursday as several egregiously bad AI-generated figures circulated from a peer-reviewed article recently published in a reputable journal. Those figures—which the authors acknowledge in the article’s text were made by Midjourney—are all uninterpretable. They contain gibberish text and, most strikingly, one includes an image of a rat with grotesquely large and bizarre genitals, as well as a text label of “dck.”

A dck pck, if you will.

Count me among the “some scientists online” who “questioned whether the text was also AI-generated”. I mean, it’s a disjointed mess. Right off, we get this:

The term “stem cell” was first coined in 1901 by Regaud

Um, no. But if that could be taken for human error, what about a sentence like this:

They were physically sheared and digested with a solution of DnaseI, hyaluronidase, collagenase, and trypsin using a two-step enzymatic digestion method in which the digestive enzymes included DnaseI, hyaluronidase, collagenase, and trypsin.

Just a bit before that, the text does a swerve into what sounds like a specific experiment, which doesn’t fit with its surroundings and is very strange in a review article. My guess is the whole thing was made by stitching together LLM responses.

The publisher, Frontiers Media, is not exactly held in high regard overall.