I Used AI to Fake a Scientific Paper. Here’s What Happened: My experiment with an IEEE journal revealed AI’s threats to scholarly publishing; IEEE Spectrum, October 27, 2026

BENJAMIN SKUSE, IEEE Spectrum; I Used AI to Fake a Scientific Paper. Here’s What Happened: My experiment with an IEEE journal revealed AI’s threats to scholarly publishing

"According to all reports, academic publishing is drowning in what has come to be called AI slop: low-quality, mass-produced content generated with AI. By 2025, an estimated 57 percent of all published academic articles exhibited detectable evidence of large language model (LLM) influence, a massive jump from 12 percent in 2023. What’s more, over 12 percent of Nature Communicationsreviews were found to be completely AI-generated in 2025.

Given that for every 40 papers showing statistical evidence of AI usage in 2025, only one formally disclosed it, these figures likely grossly underestimate LLM involvement today. Of course, evidence of AI use doesn’t necessarily mean a paper is slop. But some estimates suggest that hundreds of thousands of fake, often AI-generated, publications are now produced annually.

“It’s not just the [scientific] record under threat, it’s science as a whole,” warns Amanda Sulicz, IEEE’s research-integrity manager. “AI slop is completely eroding trust in science and every scientific process that we’ve worked for centuries to create.”

Yet statistics and statements claiming that the problem is big—perhaps even existential for science—don’t really get the message across. Just how easy is it to use AI to create a convincing but completely fake paper? And without adding even more to the burden on stretched peer reviewers, who do this work on a volunteer basis, do publishers have the tools to keep AI slop out of the scientific record?

Borrowing from the idea of “vibe coding,” in which programmers use natural-language prompts to generate code, I decided to “vibe-research” a made-up paper by prompting LLMs to generate hypotheses, code, and text with minimal human input. Then I asked Jenny Mahoney, managing editor of the multidisciplinary and open-access journal IEEE Access, if we could war-game an attempt to sneak my AI-generated monstrosity past her journal’s defenses. She and IEEE kindly agreed."

Gold Dust; The Hastings Center for Bioethics, July 28, 2025

Arthur Caplan, The Hastings Center for Bioethics ; Gold Dust

"There has been a good deal of discussion about President Trump’s executive order calling for gold standard science to be the governing standard for the federal funding of American science. His director of the Office of Science and Technology, Michael Kratsios, a businessman with no substantive training or experience in science or engineering, issued a memorandum to all federal agencies providing guidance as to how to implement the order. 

He wrote: “Gold Standard Science represents a commitment to the highest standards of scientific integrity, defined by nine core tenets: reproducible; transparent; communicative of error and uncertainty; collaborative and interdisciplinary; skeptical of its findings and assumptions; structured for falsifiability of hypotheses; subject to unbiased peer review; accepting of negative results as positive outcomes; and without conflicts of interest. These tenets ensure that federally-supported research, and research used in Federal decision-making, is transparent, rigorous, and impactful, enabling Federal decisions to be informed by the most credible, reliable, and impartial scientific evidence available.”

He gave the agencies until August 22 to submit to OSTP and post on their websites reports outlining how they plan to implement gold standard science. 

There are many matters to debate about the content of this memorandum, including how to determine reproducibility, what is meant by being skeptical of findings and assumptions, what constitutes unbiased peer review, and insuring a lack of conflicts of interest. But amid this vast number of trees is a forest that can’t be ignored. Trump’s executive order empowers his political appointees to ultimately validate research outcomes. Instead of independent expert reviews of research, a Trump functionary can look at any peer-reviewed work and declare it to be in violation of the President’s gold standard due to bias, some imagined conflict of interest, skepticism, or simply uncertainty.The United States has never had a situation in which political and ideological nonscientists got the last word about what is credible science. The direct political oversight of science represented in the gold standard currency is not sound. Moving determinations of what scientific evidence is to nonscientists is stepping directly toward the terrible results prior autocratic regimes produced using politically vetted science...

Politics has a role to play in determining what research budgets will be and ultimately whether sound science will be used to drive public policy. But the standards of valid science ought not be subject to political litmus tests."

Scientific Integrity and the Ethics of 'Utter Honesty'; The MIT Press Reader, April 2022

Robert T. Pennock, The MIT Press Reader ; Scientific Integrity and the Ethics of 'Utter Honesty'

"Integrity in science involves a community of practice, unified by its shared values."