Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science. Evidence of critical issues affecting established journals · HackerPapers discussions

Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science. Evidence of critical issues affecting established journals — mentioned by GaryBluto

Mon, 17 Aug 2026 10:31:44 GMT

I wonder if this watermarking system to lead to an increase in tortured phrases, believed to be caused by plagiarism evasion tools that change random words to applicable synonyms. https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.06751

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Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science. Evidence of critical issues affecting established journals — mentioned by duskwuff

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 19:53:51 GMT

https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.06751 found that a lot of the outputs were characteristic of an online tool called SpinBot. (The tool no longer seems to work the same way that it did at the time.)

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Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science. Evidence of critical issues affecting established journals — mentioned by duskwuff

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 19:41:01 GMT

The phenomenon of tortured phrases in published papers has been going on since at least 2020 - long before LLMs were a significant factor, and certainly before watermarking their output was a consideration. The general working theory is that these phrases are the result of a "text spinner" tool being applied to a manuscript and blindly replacing random words or phrases using a preset list of synonyms (which are often imprecise and/or inappropriate). https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.06751 found that many of the commonly observed phrases were characteristic of an online text-spinning tool.

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Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science. Evidence of critical issues affecting established journals — mentioned by duskwuff

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 19:37:36 GMT

Some more examples of these tortured phrases: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.06751 A few of my favorites are "counterfeit consciousness" (artificial intelligence), "discourse acknowledgement" (voice recognition), and "arbitrary get right of passage to memory" (random access memory).

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Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science. Evidence of critical issues affecting established journals — mentioned by armchairhacker

Sun, 16 Aug 2026 13:21:46 GMT

From 2021: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.06751 And SCIgen was generating bullshit papers that actually managed to be published in 2005: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCIgen

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Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science. Evidence of critical issues affecting established journals — mentioned by duskwuff

Sat, 16 Dec 2023 00:42:51 GMT

> The reason seems to have been the use of machine translation from languages like Chinese No, it's more deliberate than that. Per the original paper [1], the tortured phrases observed in these papers can be reproduced by running text through an online tool called "Spinbot" which processes English text by replacing words with (frequently incorrect) synonyms. Many of the replacements made are difficult to explain any other way -- replacing "ant" with "underground creepy crawly" is clearly not the work of a translator, for instance. [1]: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2107.06751.pdf

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Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science. Evidence of critical issues affecting established journals — mentioned by duskwuff

Thu, 29 Jun 2023 03:00:01 GMT

And, unfortunately, it's still an ongoing problem. Some of it even ends up getting published by IEEE, e.g. [1]. There was some research a few years ago [2] into just how widespread this issue was in scientific publishing. The situation has likely only gotten worse with the introduction of higher-quality text generation LLMs. [1]: https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8597261 [2]: https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.06751

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Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science. Evidence of critical issues affecting established journals — HN submission

Wed, 11 Aug 2021 04:19:18 GMT

A dubious writing style emerging in science

110 points; 40 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Tortured phrases: A dubious writing style emerging in science. Evidence of critical issues affecting established journals — mentioned by dang

Sun, 08 Aug 2021 18:26:19 GMT

The paper is at https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.06751. (We merged this thread and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28108111)

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