Ridiculous AI Image Of An Endowed Mouse Makes Its Way Into A Science Journal

A social media user brought attention to wildly bizarre images found in a recent volume of the peer-reviewed Frontiers Journal (an academic journal that covers the latest research for academics and professional practitioners), and it looks like using Midjourney to create whatever gibberish it comes up with is good enough to get your paper published in an academic publication.

Earlier today, virologist Dr. Charlotte Houldcroft posted a bizarre illustration of a mouse with a giant sack that sort of looks like a diagram one would find in a scientific publication — except it was labeled with nonsense and had every other telltale sign of being AI-generated.

Perhaps making things worse, the image was indeed pulled from a scientific paper on cellular functions of spermatogonial stem cells, published by a group of Chinese researchers in the peer-reviewed Frontiers Journal.

Your eyes do not deceive you: What you see is indeed a mouse with a giant sack and a phallus-looking stem coming right out of it. Asking a furry R34 artist to draw a science diagram would probably result in something like this.

The authors of the article do not hide the fact that the images are indeed AI-generated, as there's even a disclaimer that images in the article were generated by Midjourney.

The real problem is that neither this image nor the two other diagrams included in the paper make any sense, let alone help understand the material.

Now, people on social media are asking an obvious question, "How did the paper with AI-generated illustrations make its way past peer review?"

Frontiers Journal is yet to respond, and in the meantime, there's an AI-made mouse with a BMC to post memes about.

We didn't have science diagrams that look like s***posts making this sort of comeback on our 2024 bingo card, but here we are.