The figures in the paper were generated by the AI tool Midjourney, which generated some pretty, but nonsensical, illustrations with unreadable text. [...] It appears that neither the editor nor the two peer reviewers looked at the figures at all. The paper was peer-reviewed within a couple of weeks and published two days ago. [...] The authors disclose that the figures were generated by Midjourney, but the images are -- ahem -- anatomically and scientifically incorrect.
Curated from scienceintegritydigest.com →
A review article on stem cells appeared in a Frontiers journal in February 2024 illustrated with Midjourney figures whose labels are not words: protemns for proteins, dissilced, testtomcels. The anatomy in the main figure is not anatomy. The authors had disclosed that the images were generated, one of the two reviewers had flagged problems with the figures, and it was published anyway; Frontiers retracted it three days later. The interesting failure is not the generator, which did what it was asked. It is that a disclosure was made, a reviewer raised it, and the process moved past both, which is what a check looks like when nobody is required to act on it.
