Robot-written reviews fool academics

Soulless computer algorithms are already churning out weather bulletins, sports reports, rap lyrics and even passable Chinese poetry. But it seems machines have now taken another step towards replacing human enterprise by generating their own reviews of serious academic journal papers that are able to impress even experienced academics. Using automatic text generation software, computer scientists at Italy's University of Trieste created a series of fake peer reviews of genuine journal papers and asked academics of different levels of seniority to say whether they agreed with their recommendations to accept for publication or not. In a quarter of cases, academics said they agreed with the fake review's conclusions, even though they were entirely made up of computer-generated gobbledegook – or, rather, sentences picked at random from a selection of peer reviews taken from subjects as diverse as brain science, ecology and ornithology. "Sentences like'it would be good if you can also talk about the importance of establishing some good shared benchmarks' or'it would be useful to identify key assumptions in the modelling' are probably well suited to almost any review," explained Eric Medvet, assistant professor at Trieste's department of engineering and architecture, who conducted the experiment with colleagues at his university's Machine Learning Lab.