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A peer-reviewed scientific journal that this week published a study containing nonsensical AI-generated images including a gigantic rat penis has retracted the article and apologized.

The paper was authored by three scientists in China, edited by a researcher in India, reviewed by two people from the U.S. and India, and published in the open access journal Frontiers in Cell Development and Biology on Monday.

Despite undergoing multiple checks, the paper was published with AI-generated figures that went viral on social media because of their absurdity. One figure featured a rat with a massive dissected dick and balls and garbled labels such as “iollotte sserotgomar cell” and “testtomcels.” The authors said they used the generative AI tool Midjourney to create the images.

On Thursday afternoon, Frontiers added a notice saying that the paper had been corrected and a new version would be published soon. The journal later updated the notice to say that it was retracting the study entirely because “the article does not meet [Frontiers’] standards of editorial and scientific rigor.”

Reached for comment, a spokesperson for Frontiers directed Motherboard to a statement posted to the journal’s web page on Thursday apologizing to the scientific community and explaining that, in fact, a reviewer of the paper had raised concerns about the AI-generated images that were ignored.

“Our investigation revealed that one of the reviewers raised valid concerns about the figures and requested author revisions,” Frontiers’ statement reads. “The authors failed to respond to these requests. We are investigating how our processes failed to act on the lack of author compliance with the reviewers' requirements. We sincerely apologize to the scientific community for this mistake and thank our readers who quickly brought this to our attention.”

The paper had two reviewers, one in India and one based in the U.S. Motherboard contacted the U.S.-based reviewer who said that they evaluated the study based solely on its scientific merits and that it was up to Frontiers whether or not to publish the AI-generated images since the authors disclosed that they used Midjourney. Frontiers’ policies allow the use of generative AI as long as it is disclosed but, crucially, the images must also be accurate.

The embarrassing incident is an example of how the issues surrounding generative AI more broadly have seeped into academia, in ways that are sometimes concerning to scientists. Science integrity consultant Elisabeth Bik wrote on her personal blog that it was “a sad example of how scientific journals, editors, and peer reviewers can be naive—or possibly even in the loop—in terms of accepting and publishing AI-generated crap.”

Source: buttersafe.com

Larian Studios's policy and guidelines restrict the selling of fan content or goods for any of its games, including Baldur's Gate 3…

…The five basic rules for making fan content of Baldur’s Gate 3 and other Larian Studios games are:

1. Keep it free.
2. Keep it clear it’s fan content.
3. Keep it honest.
4. Keep it clean
5. Keep it legit.

The fourth rule of “Keep it clean” simply means that Larian Studios reserves the right to stop your use of its IP if it deems your content “inappropriate, offensive, damaging, or disparaging.” It isn’t forbidding you from making R-18 content.

“Keep it honest” and “Keep it clear it’s fan content” are very similar. The main rule in question is the first one, in which you cannot sell “fan content to any third parties for any type of compensation.”

If you really want to make Baldur’s Gate 3 fan content, you can do so. You simply cannot do it for profit. This would include putting something behind a paywall, or selling items at a convention. For reference, Larian Studios defines “fan content” as “fanart, videos, stories, screenshots, cosplays, mods, or anything else.” Uploading or giving things away for free are both totally alright.

I'm guessing this may be more a WotC thing than a Larian thing. Still annoyed to hear it, since things like cosplay can be expensive and I imagine they're things you put your heart into the same as art.

I've seen some damn incredible stuff at conventions before, and I'd hate to be deprived of them rather than force the artist to give their work away for free. This also makes commissioned work feel weirdly shaky, depending on what they're calling a third party?

Wonder if this will turn into a panini situation . Free amigurumi Karlach with every purchase of a $40 pencil.

For any here who are both multilingual and also experience synesthesia/ideasthesia -- concepts such as numbers, days of the week, educational subjects, music, etc. being felt or experienced to have a specific color, taste, smell or whatnot -- is the color, etc. of that thing different depending on which language you're thinking in?

It has just occurred to me that while I've always pictured Thursday to be a kind of prussian blue, the turkish word for thursday (Perşembe) is bright carnation pink. Sunday is yellow (for obvious reasons), but Pazar is white. Same with anything else. Phys Ed has always been blue, but beden eğitimi is coffee-colored.

The differences with numbers, I could chalk up to relating them with whatever pictures I was given when I was first learning their names, but one cannot present an educational depiction of the concept of Tuesday.

I'd be dying to hear anyone else's experience with this. I'm super curious, especially, to hear if this difference still stands in people who grew up bilingual.

A rock with a korok painted on it that someone left in the bushes beside a trail bordering the highway

Species discoveries can be joyous occasions, but not in this case. Eastern African forests have nearly disappeared in the past century, and neither bee species has been spotted in surveys conducted in the area since the 1990s, noted coauthor and entomologist Michael Engel, who recently moved from a position at the University of Kansas to the American Museum of Natural History.

Given that these social bees are usually abundant, it’s unlikely that the people looking for insects had simply missed them. Sometime in the last 50 to 60 years, Engel suspects, the bees vanished along with their habitat.

“It seems trivial on a planet with millions of species to sit back and go, ‘Okay, well, you documented two stingless bees that were lost,’” Engel said. “But it’s really far more troubling than that,” he added, because scientists increasingly recognize that extinction is “a very common phenomenon.”

The stingless bees are part of an overlooked but growing trend of species that are already deemed extinct by the time they’re discovered. Scientists have identified new species of bats, birds, beetles, fish, frogs, snails, orchids, lichen, marsh plants, and wildflowers by studying old museum specimens, only to find that they are at risk of vanishing or may not exist in the wild anymore.

Such discoveries illustrate how little is still known about Earth’s biodiversity and the mounting scale of extinctions. They also hint at the silent extinctions among species that haven’t yet been described — what scientists call dark extinctions.

It’s critical to identify undescribed species and the threats they face, said Martin Cheek, a botanist at the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, in the United Kingdom, because if experts and policymakers don’t know an endangered species exists, they can’t take action to preserve it.

New research has shown that vampire bats form social bonds by sharing freshly drained blood with unfamiliar members of their roost. It might sound desperately gross, but this behavior is showing scientists that vampire bats are incredibly prosocial animals.

"Food sharing in vampire bats is like how a lot of birds regurgitate food for their offspring. But what's special with vampire bats is they do this for other adults, eventually even with some previous strangers," Gerald Carter, lead author of the new study and assistant professor of evolution, ecology, and organismal biology at Ohio State University, said in a statement.