From the Chronicle of Higher Education: Last summer, Bonnie Shucha, a librarian at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, sat in her office listening to an AI voice attempt to distill her 41-page research article on scholarship visibility into a five-minute podcast. So far, the new feature on the popular site Academia.edu https://www.academia.edu/ was struggling mightily. “Bonnie suggests things like engaging with broader audiences via social media, or just sharing drafts of papers on platforms like, oh, you know, Academia.edu. A little plug there,” the podcast voice said. “I was like, Well hey, wait a minute, you’re putting words into my mouth,” said Shucha, who serves as an associate dean for library and information services and director of the law library at Wisconsin’s law school.
Shucha is not the only scholar who says Academia.edu’s new podcast feature is misrepresenting their research. They’ve taken to Academia.edu’s own feedback forums to raise their objections, calling it “offensive,” “borderline impersonation/plagiarism,” and accusing the platform of using “human work … as a free content farm for AI training.” Several academics have left the platform altogether in protest.
...Academia.edu was created in 2008 for academics to upload their work and provide the research community with an open knowledge database, among other things. Today, the site hosts 55 million papers... Academia.edu started using artificial intelligence a few years ago to summarize research and recommend papers visitors might be interested in.
...The site recently began offering users the ability to generate AI comic strips out of their work. Shucha tried the feature on an article she wrote about the first anti-sex trafficking movement in U.S. history. The resulting four-panel comic includes a joke about a “steamy expose [sic],” misspelled words, and bold type apparently meant to suggest the sounds of an assault taking place. “Gwa lump gya ra grow.”
Full story at https://www.chronicle.com/article/an-ai-bot-is-making-podcasts-with-users-research-these-scholars-arent-impressed.
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