AI-generated "letters to the editor" are flooding academic publications

Dr. Carlos Chaccour, physician scientist at the University of Navarra, noticed something fishy about a letter to the editor the New England Journal of Medicine received shortly after it published a paper of his on malaria treatment in July.

The letter was riddled with strange errors such as critiques supposedly based on other research Chaccour himself had written. So he and his co-author Matthew Rudd decided to dig deeper.

They analyzed patterns of letters to the editor over the last decade and found a remarkable increase in what they call "prolific debutantes" — new authors who suddenly had dozens, even hundreds of letters published, starting right around the time OpenAI’s ChatGPT came out.

Why would academics want to do this? Marketplace’s Meghan McCarty Carino spoke with Chaccour to find out.