Report: “Hidden AI Prompts in Academic Papers Spark Concern About Research Integrity”

From The Japan Times:

Researchers from major universities, including Waseda University in Tokyo, have been found to have inserted secret prompts in their papers so artificial intelligence-aided reviewers will give them positive feedback.

The revelation, first reported by Nikkei this week, raises serious concerns about the integrity of the research in the papers and highlights flaws in academic publishing, where attempts to exploit the peer review system are on the rise, experts say.

The newspaper reported that 17 research papers from 14 universities in eight countries have been found to have prompts in their paper in white text — so that it will blend in with the background and be invisible to the human eye — or in extremely small fonts. The papers, mostly in the field of computer science, were on arXiv, a major preprint server where researchers upload research yet to undergo peer reviews to exchange views.

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Satoshi Tanaka, a professor at Kyoto Pharmaceutical University and an expert on research integrity, said the reported response from the Waseda professor that including a prompt was to counter lazy reviewers was a “poor excuse.” If a journal with reviewers who rely entirely on AI does indeed adopt the paper, it would constitute a form of “peer review rigging,” he said.

According to Tanaka, most academic publishers have policies banning peer reviewers from running academic manuscripts through AI software for two reasons: the unpublished research data gets leaked to AI, and the reviewers are neglecting their duty to examine the papers themselves.

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