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.
<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>
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’.
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.
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.
Google Translate has existed since way back then. I remember seeing hilarious posts about bizarre translations from Chinese and other languages in the 2010s.
"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."
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?
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 assume it is due to machine translation? I do not see mentions of "failure" at all, which would be expected to exist if it was to increase variety.
I think (heard) some used to translate an article back and forth a few times to get a "new" article, but maybe it could have been some kind of "paraphrasing" software like you describe (but for avoiding plagiarism detection rather than repetitions).
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"
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.
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.
Yeah some kind of translation issue. The papers seem to know what they're talking about, and I don't entirely get the AI gut feeling, only on the key words.
Good point, but I see lots of articles are using this "kidney disappointment" so maybe but.. holy toledo look at Impacts of Renal Transplantation and its Mental (2023) by Renan Kamath : “organ disillusionment,” “kidney relocate dismissal,” and “excusal of the moved organ.”
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.
"
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
TIL I'm a lactose bigot
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.
Related, from 1988: https://bousbous.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/01/image-9.png
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>
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’.
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.
Could it just be neural translation? It existed since the mid 2010s.
That's my suspicion. I used Grammerly in 2021 and those are the type of substitutions I could see
Google Translate has existed since way back then. I remember seeing hilarious posts about bizarre translations from Chinese and other languages in the 2010s.
I wonder if something similar is happening, except people are using AI detection tools and then substituting words.
Never heard of a content spinner?
"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?
I hope the synopsis is the only thing that got mangled by the thesaurus bot...
Under "related searches" it suggests "kidney dissatisfaction", and indeed:
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C38&q=%22...
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"
> "Tortured phrases" are bizarre, nonsensical word combinations—such as "counterfeit consciousness" instead of "artificial intelligence"
Conterfeit Consciousness is gonna be the name of my new post-liquid analog modular synth IDM project.
I feel like these text spinners could actually be an untapped gold mine for creatively naming things.
Well, yes, and I call them 'distressed phrases'
Phrases experiencing discomfort
Moderately inconvenienced phrases.
Specially interrogated phrases.
Well I call it tax avoision.
From 2021: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.06751
And SCIgen was generating bullshit papers that actually managed to be published in 2005: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCIgen
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?
> persistent kidney disappointment (CKF)
Guess why the acronym doesn't match. It's called chronic kidney disease (CKD). Yeah the acronym is wrong too.
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 assume it is due to machine translation? I do not see mentions of "failure" at all, which would be expected to exist if it was to increase variety.
I think (heard) some used to translate an article back and forth a few times to get a "new" article, but maybe it could have been some kind of "paraphrasing" software like you describe (but for avoiding plagiarism detection rather than repetitions).
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...
Reminds me of "Complicated Hilbert Space" or "Quantum Door" from Siraj Raval's days of plagiarism.
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"
Searching the same thing gives me "The French phrase pèse-personne translates to bathroom scales (plural) or bathroom scale (singular) in English."
In my google search, it gave me directly a translation box where it was translated as "personal scale" (which I think is also used).
Tortured phrases, clear signs of fraud or plagiarism: https://theconversation.com/problematic-paper-screener-trawl...
This should be the top comment. Thousands of retracted papers? More informative than just a Google Scholar search.
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.
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.
AI changing words for watermarking purposes.
Interesting! I started reading and there are so many sentences like “gauges an individual's gamble of kidney disappointment.”
Changing words for watermarking .. I understand why it may do that .. but .. what an unfortunate choice of where to do it.
The substitutions are transparent and don't change the meaning. What can possible go incorrectly?
What tin possible leave incorrectly?
Isn't it more likely to be changing words to disguise plagiarism?
Update: looking at some of these, I think it is probably just poor machine translation.
Yeah some kind of translation issue. The papers seem to know what they're talking about, and I don't entirely get the AI gut feeling, only on the key words.
Good point, but I see lots of articles are using this "kidney disappointment" so maybe but.. holy toledo look at Impacts of Renal Transplantation and its Mental (2023) by Renan Kamath : “organ disillusionment,” “kidney relocate dismissal,” and “excusal of the moved organ.”
"waste can build to exorbitant level inside the blood, which harms both kidney and closures in kicking the bucket... "
"Regularly, it's more irritating than it is not kidding..."
(Pal and Gautam 2018)
Its like when you write a school essay and look up every second word in a thesaurus thinking it makes the essay better
Many of us are old enough to remember “medireview”, which emerged from different automatic replacement reasons.
"renal disappointment" yields even more papers, in all its awkwardness
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?&q=%22renal+disappointmen...
I’m giving my kidneys a participation trophy.
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:
It understood what happened correctly.I’m having a hard time figuring out if this State of Utopia thing is tongue-in-cheek or serious.
Well…it is a disappointment when your nephrons don’t work.