Springer Nature and Sketchy AI
New AI-written summaries? Sure, but don't blame us if they're crummy . . .
How Big Tech and scientific publishing philosophies have become entangled continues a bewildering downward spiral, decades old now.
First, we had Google emulate scholarly citation networks to develop its PageRank algorithm. Unfortunately, the founders didn’t realize that web links are far easier to promulgate than scholarly citations, so PageRank was soon swamped by link farms and HTML trickery, forcing Google to introduce a labyrinthine set of SEO practices publishers still struggle to comprehend to this day.
- Google’s misapplication of citation networks into a popular medium accidentally promoted one of the most damaging medical conspiracies — the false link between vaccines and autism.
In 2017, the same year as the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) funded the first biomedical preprint server, it acquired a scholarly text-mining and AI company. After four years of making no progress and a set of bizarre circumstances inside the company, Zuckerberg shuttered his acquisition. As part of this, he elevated its brand to become the umbrella brand for his collection of companies — Meta.