AI is hallucinating its way into research, and that’s not even where the problem starts

Lazy, or even fake articles written by LLMs are wreaking havoc among scientists, but only because the scientific publishing industry was rotting on its own.

As stated in Goodhart’s law ‒ and excellently illustrated by autistic researchers’ darling xkcd‒ whenever a metric becomes a target, it stops being a good metric. Indeed, the system has grown so full of exploits that the target has been divorced entirely from quality.