Elena, Aris, Marcus: : AI-Generated ‘Ghosts’ are Polluting the Scientific Literature

From Nature:

Elena Vasquez spent three months camping on the rim of Mount Nyiragongo in the Democratic Republic of the Congo back in 2019. She says the sulfur dioxide there smelt like “burnt matches mixed with rotten eggs”. Her colleague, Marcus Chen, has witnessed 11 volcanic eruptions across four continents.

Vasquez and Chen’s accounts appeared on Volcanoes Explored, a now-defunct website that described itself as a resource for “exploring the dynamic world of volcanoes”. But there’s a problem: these tales are not real and the pair of volcanology specialists is made up.

Vasquez and Chen are ‘ghost’ identities generated by Claude — the large language model (LLM) made by Anthropic in San Francisco — when prompted by users to create fictional experts, according to a preprint published in June. Gemini, Google’s LLM, was found to use a different pair of recurring characters, called Aris Thorne and Lena Petrova, and OpenAI’s GPT repeatedly used the name Elara Voss.

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Fake experts such as these can be found across the Internet as everything from blockchain specialists and astronauts to board members and podcast hosts, and they raise specific concerns around integrity of the scientific literature, say Neo Christopher Chung and Michał Brzozowski, computer scientists at the Samsung AI Center Warsaw in Poland and co-authors of the preprint.

Read the Complete Article

Direct to the Two Preprints Cited in the Article

The Ghost Couple: Correlated LLM Name Priors and Their Haunting of the Web and Academic Publishing

Reading the Finetuning Prior: Verbatim Content Recovery via Contrastive Decoding Diffing

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