In 2024, computer scientist Prof Dmitry Kobak, of Ghent University, searched more than a million biomedical research papers for trigger words favoured by the LLMs that generate AI writing. His team found that by December last year, nearly 90% had AI fingerprints on them. AI detection technology is not perfect; some forms of the software have labelled the US Constitution, written in the 1780s, as “AI-generated”. But still, Kobak said he was shocked by the scale of apparent AI use. There is a risk, he told Nature, that “whatever bias the LLM may have will just suddenly permeate the (scientific) literature”.
