Hidden AI Prompts Found in Preprint Research Papers

In late 2023, a data scientist at Stanford University pulled back the curtain on a startling trend: Academics were beginning to turn to artificial intelligence platforms like ChatGPT for paper reviews as overworked human reviewers became few and far between. Now, it appears some researchers are attempting to game the new system. Several new academic papers have been found to contain hidden AI prompts in an obvious attempt to trick AI "readers" into providing glowing feedback.

On Tuesday, Nikkei Asia shared that it had sifted through English-language preprint papers on arXiv, a free, open-access repository for scholarly articles. Researchers often upload their papers to arXiv ahead of the review process and add a DOI once a paper is published in a journal. But based on some of the papers reviewed by Nikkei, some of those researchers are hoping to skirt negative outcomes by giving AI reviewers secret prompts.

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