A Journalist Used Free AI to Forge a Scientific Paper—and the Publishers' Defenses Nearly Missed It
I Used AI to Fake a Scientific Paper. Here's What Happened
IEEE Spectrum's Benjamin Skuse set out to see how easily off-the-shelf AI could fake real research. Using only free versions of ChatGPT and Gemini, he generated a plausible paper on optical solitons—complete with figures, citations, and dense math—describing experiments that never happened. IEEE Access caught it, but only because of fabricated references. The experiment exposes a publishing system where peer review is the last line of defense and AI slop is overwhelming it.
What I liken it to is a fire, where publish-or-perish has always been there as kindling, paper mills are the gasoline, and AI is the accelerant.