Despite increasing reliance on AI tools, such as ChatGPT, their outputs can often be error-prone, misleading, or plagiarized—a phenomenon colloquially known as “AI Slop.” Recently, several papers claim that autonomous research agents can generate novel research ideas. Amidst the prevailing optimism, we discover that, concerningly, a considerable fraction of such research documents are smartly plagiarized. In this talk, I will share details about our effort to measure the extent of plagiarism in AI-generated research, and broader efforts in our lab to detect AI-generated content.
Danish Pruthi is an Assistant Professor at the Indian Institute of Science (IISc), Bangalore. He received his Ph.D. from the School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. He is broadly interested in the areas of natural language processing and deep learning, with a focus towards inclusive development and evaluation of AI models. He completed his bachelors degree in computer science from BITS Pilani, Pilani. He is also a recipient of the Schmidt Sciences AI2050 Early Career Fellowship, Siebel Scholarship, CMU Presidential Fellowship, ACL outstanding paper award and industry awards from Google, MSR and Adobe Inc. Until recently, his legal name was only Danish—an “edge case” for many deployed NLP systems, leading to airport quagmires and, in equal parts, funny anecdotes.