Journals Infiltrated With ‘Copycat’ Papers That Can Be Written By AI

An analysis of a literature database finds that text-generating AI tools — including ChatGPT and Gemini — can be used to rewrite scientific papers and produce ‘copycat’ versions that are then passed off as new research. In a preprint posted on medRxiv on 12 September, researchers identified more than 400 such papers published in 112 journals over the past 4.5 years, and demonstrated that AI-generated biomedicine studies could evade publishers’ anti-plagiarism checks.

The study’s authors warn that individuals and paper mills — companies that produce fake papers to order and sell authorships — might be exploiting publicly available health data sets and using large language models (LLMs) to mass-produce low-quality papers that lack scientific value.

“If left unaddressed, this AI-based approach can be applied to all sorts of open-access databases, generating far more papers than anyone can imagine,” says Csaba Szabo, a pharmacologist at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, who was not involved in the work. “This could open up Pandora’s box [and] the literature may be flooded with synthetic papers.”