Publisher retracting five papers because of “clear evidence” that they were “computer generated”

Retraction Watch:

A publisher is retracting five papers from one of its conference series after discovering what it says was “clear evidence” that the articles were generated by a computer.

The five papers were published from 2018 to 2020 in IOP Publishing’s “Conference Series: Earth and Environmental Science.” According to an IOP spokesperson, the retraction notices will all read:

This article has been retracted by IOP Publishing in light of clear evidence that it was computer generated. IOP Publishing is investigating why this was not identified during the submission and peer review process by the conference. As a member of the Committee for Publication Ethics (COPE) this has been investigated in accordance with COPE guidelines and it was agreed the article should be retracted.

Here’s the abstract for one of the papers, “Neural Networks Considered Harmful:”

System administrators agree that omniscient modalities are an interesting new topic in the field of complexity theory, and researchers concur. Given the current status of lossless information, experts shockingly desire the visualization of model checking. In this position paper, we use biomorphic information to disconfirm that the little-known random algorithm for the simulation of journaling file systems by Van Jacobson is optimal.

It and the other four papers — “Financial Information Security Using Modular Communication,” “Singular Topoi of Countably Non-local, Continuously Cayley, Maximal Elements and the Continuity of Closed Elements,” “Newton Categories for a Solvable Element,” and “Decoupling Evolutionary Programming from Gigabit Switches in Neural Networks” — show telltale signs of being created by SciGen, “an automatic CS paper generator” developed by graduate students at MIT in 2005, or Mathgen and Physgen, which are similar.