Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science. Evidence of critical issues affecting established journals

Understand

Probabilistic text generators have been used to produce fake scientific papers for more than a decade.

• Such nonsensical papers are easily detected by both human and machine.
• Now more complex AI-powered generation techniques produce texts indistinguishable from that of humans and the generation of scientific texts from a few keywords has been documented.
• Our study introduces the concept of tortured phrases: unexpected weird phrases in lieu of established ones, such as 'counterfeit consciousness' instead of 'artificial intelligence.' We combed the literature for tortured phrases and study one reputable journal where these concentrated en masse.