There’s been a mass resignation of the editors at The Journal of Human Evolution. The reason? Elsevier has, as usual, mismanaged the journal and done everything they could to maximize profit at the expense of quality. In particular, they decided that human editors were too expensive, so they’re trying to do the job with AI.
In fall of 2023, for example, without consulting or informing the editors, Elsevier initiated the use of AI during production, creating article proofs devoid of capitalization of all proper nouns (e.g., formally recognized epochs, site names, countries, cities, genera, etc.) as well italics for genera and species. These AI changes reversed the accepted versions of papers that had already been properly formatted by the handling editors. This was highly embarrassing for the journal and resolution took six months and was achieved only through the persistent efforts of the editors. AI processing continues to be used and regularly reformats submitted manuscripts to change meaning and formatting and require extensive author and editor oversight during proof stage.
They also proposed cutting the pay for the editor-in-chief in half.
Keep in mind that Elsevier charges authors a $3990 processing fee for each submission. I guess they needed to improve the economics of their piratical mode of operation a little more.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2018/sep/13/scientific-publishing-rip-off-taxpayers-fund-research
And this: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/academic-publishers-murdoch-socialist
Monbiot is always worth reading, even if you disagree with him.
“they’re trying to do the job with AI” – WTAF? Surely PZ you are making a Xmas Fool’s Joke? No one could be this stupid. Could they….?
@nomdeplume #3:
Far too many people have swallowed the AI hype, and there’s no shortage of people who know better yet are willing to sell their services to the greedy and to the desperately underfunded seeing no way out but to take a punt. “Just one more wafer-thin capital budget, Mr Creosote.”
datum: https://www.elsevier.com/en-au/about/policies-and-standards/the-use-of-generative-ai-and-ai-assisted-technologies-in-writing-for-elsevier
@4 Nice analogy.
There is a fool born every minute and a grifter born every second minute…
It’s never enough just to be profitable, for a “public” company. They have to keep growing, so their stock price can keep going up. Even when there’s nowhere to grow to.
This is going to my colleagues come January 6th. There’s a lot of “excitement” around the shop about AI generated content much less content prepped for publishing by AI. What I don’t get is how the lawyers ever said “This seems like a really good idea.” A mistake could spell…would spell…huge liability suits, which can seriously hurt profits.
robro @8: Businesses rarely seem to consider liability issues. Possibly because the people at the top expect to retire and be out of the company before any lawsuits hit.
Nemo@7–
The current firehose of scientific literature publication is at least in part an attempt to grow the market beyond its traditional limits. The problem is, of course, that’s there’s only so much good research coming out, so the only way to expand is to allow increasingly poor quality papers into print.
It seems to me the long-term outcome is that a large chunk of scientific literature will be created by gig-economy research assistants on subsistence income writing prompts for AI-generated articles, to be submitted to journal editors reviewing and revising the papers by AI, and on publication, the papers will be fed into a “systematic review” AI with inclusion/exclusion criteria geared to give whatever answer cashed-up vested interests want. Then PR flaks for Industry X can release SRs with meta-analysis of scores of papers that purport to show Product Y does not, after all, cause Problem Z, all without a human doing any of the research, review, or analysis.
microraptor @ #9 — I don’t know much about businesses in general, except that most of them probably can’t afford many lawyers. The one I have worked for for 40 years has always had lawyers, even when it was relatively small. In the last 20 years or so, you could barely count them.
In addition to robro’s comment, large businesses are also able to lobby for legal exemptions, and when that fails, shop around for business-friendly jurisdictions.