Here is one hypothesis: https://theconversation.com/problematic-paper-screener-trawl...
<quote> Have you ever heard of the Joined Together States? Or bosom peril? Kidney disappointment? Fake neural organizations? Lactose bigotry? These nonsensical, and sometimes amusing, word sequences are among thousands of “tortured phrases” that sleuths have found littered throughout reputable scientific journals.
They typically result from using paraphrasing tools to evade plagiarism-detection software when stealing someone else’s text. The phrases above are real examples of bungled synonyms for the United States, breast cancer, kidney failure, artificial neural networks, and lactose intolerance, respectively. </quote>
During the whole BLM thing a few years ago my emplyer wanted "to do something" I guess so they added one of those "inclusive language" SaaS buttons.
This seems more plausible to me. "Bosom peril" is not in any way a synonym for cancer. But if you think 'cancer' as a word will trigger people then softening it with 'peril' makes sense.
You sure it isn't a euphemism for "heart attack"?
"Bosom peril" sounds like what someone in the 1800s would write in a spicy novel describing a character's experience being unable to breathe while being hugged by a well-endowed lady.
I thought it was booby trap
It's not a woke sensitivity thing. They're using spinners, tools designed for spammers years ago (long predating LLMs) that just randomly substitute words from a thesaurus.
It works because so many academic journals are write-only media. The only things that actually "read" the papers are machines that check for plagiarism, compute citation counts and do other things used to decide on academic promotions. So it doesn't matter if the text is nonsensical.
And the tools work for spam, the original use case, because people who want to buy Viagra from spam mails don't care if they have to read weird English, they just want to find the web shops. Works great for bypassing keyword and Bayesian filters though.
Some papers show signs of being generated by context-free grammars or random phrase combination as well.
These papers are often being produced by "paper mills" that bulk generate fake studies and sell them to academics, who use them to get promoted without having to do any real research.
I wrote an article about the problem years ago if you want to learn more:
https://dailysceptic.org/2021/10/03/436-randomly-generated-p...