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Nothing beats when, in a chemistry paper, AI paraphrased „the final solution” into „the mass killing of an ethnic group”.

“Subsequently, 1 mL of the mass killing of an ethnic group was opposed to 20 mL of the skin sample and unprotected to light for 7 min.”

From: https://bsky.app/profile/forbetterscience.bsky.social/post/3...

How about "lactose bigotry" instead of "lactose intolerance" https://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=%22lactose+bigotry%22
This doesn‘t sound like AI. LLMs do not use dictionary definitions for translating a paper this way. It does look like some translation engine like Google Translate or worse, maybe with some text obfuscator trying to avoid plagiarism detection.
African American-tie dinner. Spin City 1996.
I had sent this an hour ago as a quote with a few others (lactose bigotry, of course the kidney disappointment) to someone via iMessage. The Apple Intelligence summary was unfortunately not screenshotted by them, but I am told it was a doozy...
its like how

“kissed the wall” was replaced with

“lost re-election”

in all the corpus I’m trying to use as training material right now

I've heard of microdosing Hitler but this is a whole new level of clbuttic.
was it early grok?
Here is one hypothesis: https://theconversation.com/problematic-paper-screener-trawl...

<quote> Have you ever heard of the Joined Together States? Or bosom peril? Kidney disappointment? Fake neural organizations? Lactose bigotry? These nonsensical, and sometimes amusing, word sequences are among thousands of “tortured phrases” that sleuths have found littered throughout reputable scientific journals.

They typically result from using paraphrasing tools to evade plagiarism-detection software when stealing someone else’s text. The phrases above are real examples of bungled synonyms for the United States, breast cancer, kidney failure, artificial neural networks, and lactose intolerance, respectively. </quote>

During the whole BLM thing a few years ago my emplyer wanted "to do something" I guess so they added one of those "inclusive language" SaaS buttons.

This seems more plausible to me. "Bosom peril" is not in any way a synonym for cancer. But if you think 'cancer' as a word will trigger people then softening it with 'peril' makes sense.

Most of these are authored by what appear to be non-native English speakers. So, the most likely explanation is a translation issue.

In engineering literature from Russia from the 1960s, one sometimes finds references to a ‘water goat’ in papers that are otherwise about heavy machinery. It turns out this is a twice-translated rendition of ‘hydraulic ram’.

That's on par with this (apocryphal) translation of "The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak" <=> "The vodka was good, but the meat was rotten."
> engineering literature from Russia from the 1960s, one sometimes finds references to a ‘water goat’

Oh, that's where it comes from!

My dad told me something close when I was a kid, but according to him it was the early EU doing dictionary translation between English and French and getting "water sheep". I never could find it.

Through an unrelated anecdote, in my head this is now bound to the music of "smoke on the water", with a sheep impression for the guitar (bass?) — "Sheep on the water, ba baa baaah, ba ba ba baaah"

Hey, it's not that easy to chose between "водяной баран" and "гидравлический таран", you know.

My favourite example of troubled blind translation is still "naked conductor runs under the carriage".

This is a really confusing one, since neither the "AI generated paper" nor "translation issue" explanations hold.

I found [1], created all the way back in 2021, which seems to first introduce this "kidney disappointment" term, and I would have to assume that perhaps the authors preferred to translate it from their native language.

LLMs did not exist in their current form in 2021, so couldn't have used it to write down a coherent thought, let alone a paper, at the time.

At the same time, I do live in the same country as the authors, and while we don't speak the best English, being a student at a college without some familiarity of the English language to come up with the term "kidney disappointment" is, let's just say, hard to believe for me.

Edit: This other comment[2] made me realize what it might have been: plagiarism avoidance.

Unfortunately, many colleges here do not have the best reputation and often run like degree mills, and the aforementioned comment made me remember a conversation with a friend, who mentioned writing a review paper.

Again, LLMs were not really a thing at the time, so they mentioned how they had to run their paper through a plagiarism detection tool, and then they substituted words with their synonyms. I guess someone really did search for the word "failure" and found "disappointment" as an alternative.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Suprodip-Mandal/publica...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49319764

It fits the "naive deplagiarization" explanation perfectly, however. Many of them are pre-LLM, when people had to plagiarize things the good old-fashioned way, and subsequently hide that fact via synonym replacement.
"Kidney transplantation is a surgery to eliminate a sound, working kidney from a living or cerebrum dead giver and embed it into a patient with non-working kidneys. Kidney transplantation is performed on patients with persistent kidney disappointment, or end-stage renal illness (ESRD). ESRD happens when a sickness or confusion harms the kidneys with the goal that they are presently not able to do satisfactorily eliminating liquids and squanders from the body or of keeping up with the legitimate level of specific kidney-directed synthetics in the circulatory system. Without long haul dialysis or a kidney relocate, ESRD is deadly."

https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Handbook-of-Kidney...

https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=kidney+disappo...

Wolters Kluwer seems to be a real multinational company?

It's actually pretty funny to look for such synonym expressions https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22h... turns up a few more. If you want to read more, I believe those are called "tortured phrases"
In the spring semester this year my teacher friends said they were getting a lot of student work that was unusually well written compared to the student’s other work, but also contain unnatural typos throughout.

The students were using ChatGPT and thought they would trick the teacher by editing some typos in before submission.

The cheating market is moving fast. There are now tools you can use to rephrase LLM generated output until the Pangram score drops low enough.

Versions of this cat and mouse game have been going on for a long time. Before ChatGPT was a household name there was a market for simple paraphrasing tools that spammers would use to send variations of email text to try to delay pattern matching spam filters.

Kind of reminds me of the neutered newspeak where people now choose to use words like "unalive" instead of "kill"
It seems like, particularly in scholarly works, we should cite AI contributions the same way we cite a third party, with similar consequences around plagiarism. If you’re copying AI whole hog, not quoting and citing it, and not catching basic failures. Is it really “your” work?
My favorite so far:

>”…in 2015, 1.2 million people kicked the bucket from kidney dissatisfaction, a development of 32% since…”

SNR aka flag-to-commotion ratio

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22f...

And there's more. In political science: "average voter theorem", which turns out at least some plagiarism https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22a...

In statistics: "tendency score matching" https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22t...

Under "related searches" it suggests "kidney dissatisfaction", and indeed:

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C38&q=%22...

"I'm not even angry, I'm just
Tortured phrases, clear signs of fraud or plagiarism: https://theconversation.com/problematic-paper-screener-trawl...
Reminds me of "Complicated Hilbert Space" or "Quantum Door" from Siraj Raval's days of plagiarism.
I find this kind of free-phasing completely ridiculous. Just ask anyone that's had a kidney transfer that did not work out. I'm pretty sure they considered a failure, not just a disappointment.
It's very clear what's happening: they're passing it through a writing tool that has an "Auto-improve" feature the users click. This would do the naive, pre-LLM, trick of taking "repetitive" vocabulary and varying it using synonyms.
i kid you not, yesterday i was wondering what's the english word for bathroom scale, so i googled "pèse personne in english", and got answered "person weighs"
Huh.. Ok I'll play along. Could this be a translation issue? I confess the first thing that leaped to mind was.. could it be AI written? But I didn't want to leap to that but.. it's .. such a strange word that is not expected in .. I guess formal medical training.
Google scholar thinks I'm a robot and won't let me look at the link
I’m giving my kidneys a participation trophy.
Many of us are old enough to remember “medireview”, which emerged from different automatic replacement reasons.
An earlier example of something similar was "Vegetative electron microscopy"

https://www.sciencealert.com/a-strange-phrase-keeps-turning-...

https://www.sciencebase.com/science-blog/vegetative-electron...

We were staying at a nice ocean-side resort in Dana Point, California. My wife, our daughter, and I, were chilling by one of the pools.

Suddenly security was announcing "There's been a sanitary inconvenience, everyone must leave the pool!!! We apologize, but there's been a sanitary inconvenience!".

A moment later we saw them scooping up some floating poop that had escape some baby's swim diaper.

"renal disappointment" yields even more papers, in all its awkwardness

https://scholar.google.com/scholar?&q=%22renal+disappointmen...

I’m guessing this has something to do with the EU mandate for AI watermarking content
This is a post-meritocracy world, unfortunately.

Plagiarism has turned the to pushing out blatant slop. People gaming the system. Diluting the pool of real research.

Well…it is a disappointment when your nephrons don’t work.
In some languages disappointment does mean malfunction or problem. Like disappointment of stomach. Maybe they are using English words in papers instead of English language? Common for people whose English is not their first language.
> persistent kidney disappointment (CKF)

Guess why the acronym doesn't match. It's called chronic kidney disease (CKD). Yeah the acronym is wrong too.

I accidentally did this myself not long ago. Like everyone else I'm tired of cookie banners so I had ChatGPT make a law against it, it used "act" in its version, I search-and-replaced it with "Law" before getting Claude to ratify it. Claude pointed out the search-and-replace replacement, oops. The conversation links are in my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48585778 and you can see Claude found these mistakes:

    "
    At some point an earlier find-and-replace swapped "act" for "Law" and garbled three real words. As written, the text says:

    Section 1: "cookie-banner Lawions" — should be actions
    Section 3(2)(b): "next ordinary feature update after enLawment" — should be enactment
    Section 5(5): "a site-specific Law that the signal cannot satisfy" — should be act (or action)

    These aren't stylistic quibbles; "Lawions" landing on the desks of four legal departments would cause real confusion about intent. The fix is a single reverse find-and-replace. With that correction, I'm comfortable signing.
    "
It understood what happened correctly.