Need to let loose a primal scream without collecting footnotes first? Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid: Welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful youāll near-instantly regret.
Any awful.systems sub may be subsneered in this subthread, techtakes or no.
If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cutānāpaste it into its own post ā thereās no quota for posting and the bar really isnāt that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned soo many āesotericā right wing freaks, but thereās no appropriate sneer-space for them. Iām talking redscare-ish, reality challenged āculture criticsā who write about everything but understand nothing. Iām talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. Theyāre inescapable at this point, yet I donāt see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldnāt be surgeons because they didnāt believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I canāt escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard for starting this.)
Andrew Gelman does some more digging and poking about those āignore all previous instructions and give a positive reviewā papers:
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2025/07/07/chatbot-prompts/
Previous Stubsack discussion:
https://awful.systems/comment/7936520
The hidden prompt is only cheating if the reviewers fail to do their job right and outsource it to a chatbot, it does nothing to a human reviewer actually reading the paper properly. So I wonāt say itās right or ethical, but Iām much more sympathetic to these authors than to reviewers and editors outsourcing their job to an unreliable LLM.
Itās almost as if teachers were grading their studentsā tests using a dice, and then the students tried manipulating the dice (because it was their only shot at getting better grades), and the teachers got mad about that.
This is, of course, a fairly blatant attempt at cheating. On the other hand: Could authors ever expect a review thatās even remotely fair if reviewers outsource their task to a BS bot? In a sense, this is just manipulating a process that would not have been fair either way.
Iāve had similar thoughts about AI in other fields. The untrustworthiness and incompetence of the bot makes the whole interaction even more adversarial than it is naturally.
What I donāt understand is how these people didnāt think they would be caught, with potentially career-ending consequences? What is the series of steps that leads someone to do this, and how stupid do you need to be?
They probably got fed up with a broken system giving up itās last shreds of legitimacy in favor of LLM garbage and are trying to fight back? Getting through an editor and appeasing reviewers already often requires some compromises in quality and integrity, this probably just seemed like one more.