Springer started off awful, and now many decades later it’s pure garbage. All those times in between? Also pretty bad.
“DS” in the Retraction Watch comments makes a good observation:
What scientific book only has 46 references?
A question for future work: This book is part of a “Transactions on Computer Systems and Networks” series. How many of the others in that series are also slop?
When this was first posted I too was curious about the book series. It appears that nearly every book in the series is authored by academics affiliated with Indian universities. Modi’s government has promoted and invested heavily in AI.
reliably determining whether content (or an issue) is AI generated remains a challenge, as even human-written text can appear ‘AI-like.’
True (even if this answer sounds like something a chatbot would generate). I have come across a few human slop generators/bots in my life myself. However, making up entire titles of books or papers appears to be a specialty of AI. Humans would not normally go to this trouble, I believe. They would either steal text directly from their sources (without proper attribution) or “quote” existing works without having read them.
The one human-written slop text I’ve read in my life was a textbook for a philosophy 101 class. The text was wordy and meandering to the point of being almost unreadable.
The whole department was corrupt though. The textbook was written by the dean, expensive, and was filled with exercises on perforated pages that had to be ripped out and turned in (no photocopies allowed, and hence no secondhand market for the book). The teacher also showed obvious favoritism towards Christian students and found a way to make the entire class about god.
So anyway that’s why I never minored in Philosophy.
I’ve seen quite a few management books that might as well have been AI, except they long predate it.
I’m reminded of that Folding Ideas video where he writes a book for some get rich quick book mill scheme. I bet that stuff is all AI now.
On one hand, the ghostwriters of the world truly didn’t deserve to have to cope with those conditions. On the other hand, I don’t know that taking them out back and telling them about the rabbits is what we had in mind.
