Apparently an MIT student fabricated data on an AI study that got a lot of traction and even made its way to being cited by Congress.
The fabrication was egregious. It didn't just make up a few numbers here or there, fix a few outliers, y'know? It literally made up the existence of an AI tool that companies were supposedly using, but didn't exist. Can't understand why anyone would go to such extreme lengths to make stuff up.
I understand when people do this to make a statement about a field of study.
it was never published though...
which is kinda concerning that Congress would cite unpublished graduate student working papers. People need to realize that arxiv and SSRN, and even the NBER working paper series, don't really have quality checks!
This happens a lot in other fields, like medicine.
I have mixed feelings about it. On one hand, working papers aren't nothing (they're not unlike other reporting that has no peer review) and peer review is a pretty flawed process. On the other, people probably assume things like this have undergone the heightened scrutiny of other published results.
Yeah, plenty of frauds made it past peer review as well, after all
Like many things in modern life, the edifice of academia is built on norms and cultural standards that no longer obtain. The body is dead but the corpse isn't entirely cold yet. Will be interesting to see what follows once it is.
indeed, despite being in academia, i've been jaded about it for a long time
Probably he just prompted an AI model to write that whole research
It's probably because no one is verifying anything anymore.
Knowledge production has become cheaper than knowledge verification. It's a real problem