Hilarious but true: a category of rubbish research papers, run through a word-for-word thesaurus in an attempt to avoid detection of plagiarism and duplication, can in fact be easily detected. Holly Else reports on a preprint posted in July by Guillaume Cabanac and colleagues. Some juicy howlers, called “tortured phrases” by the paper’s authors: counterfeit consciousness for artificial intelligence, irregular esteem for random value, and flag to commotion for signal to noise.
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theater, natural history and conservation, the utterly mundane, and Etruscan 8-tracks