<quote> Have you ever heard of the Joined Together States? Or bosom peril? Kidney disappointment? Fake neural organizations? Lactose bigotry? These nonsensical, and sometimes amusing, word sequences are among thousands of “tortured phrases” that sleuths have found littered throughout reputable scientific journals.
They typically result from using paraphrasing tools to evade plagiarism-detection software when stealing someone else’s text. The phrases above are real examples of bungled synonyms for the United States, breast cancer, kidney failure, artificial neural networks, and lactose intolerance, respectively. </quote>
“Subsequently, 1 mL of the mass killing of an ethnic group was opposed to 20 mL of the skin sample and unprotected to light for 7 min.”
From: https://bsky.app/profile/forbetterscience.bsky.social/post/3...
In engineering literature from Russia from the 1960s, one sometimes finds references to a ‘water goat’ in papers that are otherwise about heavy machinery. It turns out this is a twice-translated rendition of ‘hydraulic ram’.
I found [1], created all the way back in 2021, which seems to first introduce this "kidney disappointment" term, and I would have to assume that perhaps the authors preferred to translate it from their native language.
LLMs did not exist in their current form in 2021, so couldn't have used it to write down a coherent thought, let alone a paper, at the time.
At the same time, I do live in the same country as the authors, and while we don't speak the best English, being a student at a college without some familiarity of the English language to come up with the term "kidney disappointment" is, let's just say, hard to believe for me.
Edit: This other comment[2] made me realize what it might have been: plagiarism avoidance.
Unfortunately, many colleges here do not have the best reputation and often run like degree mills, and the aforementioned comment made me remember a conversation with a friend, who mentioned writing a review paper.
Again, LLMs were not really a thing at the time, so they mentioned how they had to run their paper through a plagiarism detection tool, and then they substituted words with their synonyms. I guess someone really did search for the word "failure" and found "disappointment" as an alternative.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Suprodip-Mandal/publica...
Such translations were not unusual.
Around 2017 to 2019 I used a lot "Google translate", because it saved time despite its flaws, but there never was even a single sentence that I could let exactly as generated by "Google translate".
In each sentence I had to change at least a word or two, and many were hilarious. This was for translations between English and German. I assume that for other more distant languages the translations must have been much worse.
Conterfeit Consciousness is gonna be the name of my new post-liquid analog modular synth IDM project.
I feel like these text spinners could actually be an untapped gold mine for creatively naming things.
And SCIgen was generating bullshit papers that actually managed to be published in 2005: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCIgen
https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Handbook-of-Kidney...
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=kidney+disappo...
Wolters Kluwer seems to be a real multinational company?
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C38&q=%22...
In statistics: "tendency score matching" https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22t...
I think (heard) some used to translate an article back and forth a few times to get a "new" article, but maybe it could have been some kind of "paraphrasing" software like you describe (but for avoiding plagiarism detection rather than repetitions).
Changing words for watermarking .. I understand why it may do that .. but .. what an unfortunate choice of where to do it.
Update: looking at some of these, I think it is probably just poor machine translation.
"Regularly, it's more irritating than it is not kidding..."
(Pal and Gautam 2018)
Guess why the acronym doesn't match. It's called chronic kidney disease (CKD). Yeah the acronym is wrong too.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?&q=%22renal+disappointmen...
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At some point an earlier find-and-replace swapped "act" for "Law" and garbled three real words. As written, the text says:
Section 1: "cookie-banner Lawions" — should be actions
Section 3(2)(b): "next ordinary feature update after enLawment" — should be enactment
Section 5(5): "a site-specific Law that the signal cannot satisfy" — should be act (or action)
These aren't stylistic quibbles; "Lawions" landing on the desks of four legal departments would cause real confusion about intent. The fix is a single reverse find-and-replace. With that correction, I'm comfortable signing.
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