Month: February 2024

The rat with the big balls and the enormous penis – how Frontiers published a paper with botched AI-generated images

A review article with some obviously fake and non-scientific illustrations created by Artificial Intelligence (AI) was the talk on X (Twitter) today.

The figures in the paper were generated by the AI tool Midjourney, which generated some pretty, but nonsensical, illustrations with unreadable text.

It appears that neither the editor nor the two peer reviewers looked at the figures at all. The paper was peer-reviewed within a couple of weeks and published two days ago.

Dear readers, today I present you: the rat with the enormous family jewels and the diƨlocttal stem ells.

Tweet by Dr. Houldcroft discussing Figure 1 from the paper. Source: https://twitter.com/DrCJ_Houldcroft/status/1758111493181108363
Continue reading “The rat with the big balls and the enormous penis – how Frontiers published a paper with botched AI-generated images”

Problems in Harvard Medical School studies include images taken from other researchers’ papers and vendor websites

Over the last week I’ve been analyzing a set of papers from a research group at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, which falls under the Harvard Medical School. The papers have the usual image problems we unfortunately encounter so often, such as duplicated photos of mice and overlapping Western blots.

But this set also includes a 2022 paper that appears to have copied/pasted several figure panels from other researchers and even from scientific vendors. Most of these problems were found with ImageTwin or reverse image searches.

Quick links [the spreadsheet and slide have been updated with an additional problem found on Feb 2, 2024]:

  • spreadsheet with the 28 29 papers found with PubPeer links [Excel file]
  • slide deck with the 58 59 image problems found in the 28 29 papers [PDF].
An image that appears to have been copied from a scientific seller’s website.
See: https://pubpeer.com/publications/FF5706E8826CB8D45481E942A679EE
Continue reading “Problems in Harvard Medical School studies include images taken from other researchers’ papers and vendor websites”