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Pulled From the Trough: Slop Images in Academic Journals
This project collects images created using generative artificial intelligence (gen AI) that have appeared in academic journals and books..If you run across examples of gen AI images in journals or books - whether figures, graphical abstract, covers, or other - please submit it using this form: https://bit.ly/JournalSlopVersion historyVersion 1.0: Released 18 December 2025. Nine entries.Version 2.0: Released 5 January 2026. Four new entries; clickable hyperlinks added to URLs; other minor changes.Version 3.0: Released 31 March 2026. One new entry.Version 2.0: 1 May 2026. Due to erroneous file upload, rollback to previous version until such time as the correct file can be repaired and uploaded.Version 4.0: Released 15 May 2026. Two new entries.Version 5.0: Released 2 June 2026. One new entry.Version 6.0: Released 15 June 2026. One new entry.Version 7.0. Released 17 June 2026. One new entry.Version 8.0: Released 18 June 2026. Two new entries; minor edits; typesetting improvements (real italics and bold type!).Version 8.1: Released 19 June 2026. Hyperlinks fixed.Version 9.0: Released 4 July 2026. One new entry.Version 10.0: Released 12 July 2026. One new entry.Version 11.0: Released 27 July 2026. One new entry.Version 12: Released 2 August 2026. Ten new entries.Version 13: Released 13 August 2026. Eight new entries.Version 14: Released 17 August 2026. Four new entries.Version 15: Released 24 August 2026. Seven new entries.
![5 Ghostwriter in the Machine
A unique selling point of these systems is conversing and writing in a human-like way. This is imminently understandable, although wrong-headed, when one realises these are systems that
essentially function as lossy2
content-addressable memory: when
input is given, the output generated by the model is text that
stochastically matches the input text. The reason text at the output looks novel is because by design the AI product performs
an automated version of what is known as mosaic or patchwork
plagiarism (Baždarić, 2013) — due to the nature of input masking and next token prediction, the output essentially uses similar words in similar orders to what it has been exposed to. This
makes the automated flagging of plagiarism unlikely, which is
also true when students or colleagues perform this type of copypaste and then thesaurus trick, and true when so-called AI plagiarism detectors falsely claim to detect AI-produced text (Edwards, 2023a). This aspect of LLM-based AI products can be
seen as an automation of plagiarism and especially of the research paper mill (Guest, 2025; Guest, Suarez, et al., 2025; van
Rooij, 2022): the “churn[ing] out [of] fake or poor-quality journal papers” (Sanderson, 2024; Committee on Publication Ethics,](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:vsyj5jtayxcq5dw5mtja4xtb/bafkreieufyngjbrn23zkmesrimcwemxkxtaf2x7d3bedjt7bg65htgtkrm)
