Have you seen the statistics about high impact journals having higher retraction/unverified rates on papers?

The root causes can be argued...but keep that in mind.

No single paper is proof. Bodies of work across many labs, independent verification, etc is the actual gold standard.

no it's a long term incoming failure

partially due to legacy of science historically being rooted in "it matters more who you (or your parents) are" societies (due to them having had the money in somewhat modern history) (or like some would say the "old white man problem", except it has nothing to do with skin color, or man and only limited to do with old)

partially due to how much more "science (output)" is produced today and ways which once worked to have reasonable QA don't work that well in todays scale anymore

partially due to how many flows

partially due to human nature (as in people tend to care more about "exiting", "visible" things etc.)

People have been pushing for change in a lot of ways like:

- pushing to make full re-poducability a must have (but that is hard, especially for statistics based things only a few companies can even afford to try to run. But also hard due to it requiring a lot of transparency and open data access, and especially the alter is often very much something many owners of data sets are not okay with.

- pushing for more appreciation of null results, or failures. (To be clear I mean both appreciation in form of monetary support and in the traditional sense of the word of people (colleges) appreciating it).

- pushing for more verifying of papers by trying to reproduce it (both as in more money/time resources for it and in changing the mind set from it being a daunting unappreciated task to it being a nice thing to do)

but to little change happened in the end before modern LLM AI hit the scene and now it has made things so much harder as it's now easy to mass produce slob but reasonable looking (non) sience

> It’s like fake news is taking in science now.

I didn't think this was new? Like, it's been a few years since that replication crisis things kicked off.

> Science is supposed to be immune to these kind of bullshit

You have misplaced confidence in the scientific method. It was never immune to corruption, either by those deliberately manipulating it for their personal gain, or simply due to ignorance and bad methodology. We have examples of both throughout history. In either case, peer review is not infallible.

The new problem introduced by modern AI tools is that they drastically lower the skill requirement for anyone remotely capable in the field to generate data that appears correct on the surface, with relatively little effort and very quickly, while errors can only be discovered by actual experts in the field investing considerable amounts of time and resources. In some fields like programming the required resources to review code are relatively minor, but in fields like biology this (from what I've read) is much more difficult and expensive.

But, yes, science is being flooded with (m|d)isinformation, just like all our other media channels.

The Bullshit asymmetry principle comes to mind https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini%27s_law

Yes. And let's not get started on that ML Quantum Wormhole bullshit...

We've taken this all too far. It is bad enough to lie to the masses in Pop-Sci articles. But we're straight up doing it in top tier journals. Some are good faith mistakes, but a lot more often they seem like due diligence just wasn't ever done. Both by researchers and reviewers.

I at least have to thank the journals. I've hated them for a long time and wanted to see their end. Free up publishing and bullshit novelty and narrowing of research. I just never thought they'd be the ones to put the knife through their own heart.

But I'm still not happy about that tbh. The only result of this is that the public grows to distrust science more and more. In a time where we need that trust more than ever. We can't expect the public to differentiate nuanced takes about internal quibbling. And we sure as hell shouldn't be giving ammunition to the anti-science crowds, like junk science does...