AI Man -- the latest strange phenomenon

One of AI Man's little helpers. If you want him to, he will quite happily write your articles for you, without you having to do any thinking at all. 

One of our contributors used this old quote the other day: "A Man sees what he wants to see......and disregards the rest".    By adding the letter "I" it becomes even more interesting:

"AI Man sees what he wants to see......and disregards the rest"

AI Man is making more and more appearances nowadays, and not just in the field of Stonehenge argumentation.  How do we recognise this strange and rather pathetic figure?  Well, his main characteristic is that he voluntarily gives up his capacity for rational thought and critical scrutiny, and asks AI to do it for him instead.   It is essentially a cowardly and somewhat pathetic act.  And AI, being what it is, is only too happy to oblige, even to the extent of writing detailed commentaries, reviews or articles which look for all the world as if they have been written by genuine human beings.

In theory, content generated entirely by AI should be prohibited or rejected outright by academic publishers. Academic platforms like Researchgate do not actually ban AI-generated materials, but depend on the publishers of academic journals to do the scrutiny job for them.  But the policy falls flat on its face with the online publication of "pre-publication" or pre-print versions of articles that may or may not be destined for journal submission.  I have used this "pre-publication" route myself either for articles that are in the journal publication pipeline or for articles intended to place new material onto the record or to stimulate discussion.  So the Researchgate platform provides a useful academic service in this regard.

But Researchgate has no editorial role, and refers to itself as a social networking site.  It does not screen out "pre-publication" articles that are written by AI, and that is a major failing.  So our friendly or unfriendly AI Man can publish material on the platform under false pretences, using his own name, or he can attribite the authorship to some weird AI bot either known or unknown to the readers.  There are plenty of them out there, including the one called Grok.   

We are in very dangerous territory here..........