Huh.. Ok I'll play along. Could this be a translation issue? I confess the first thing that leaped to mind was.. could it be AI written? But I didn't want to leap to that but.. it's .. such a strange word that is not expected in .. I guess formal medical training.
This is a really confusing one, since neither the "AI generated paper" nor "translation issue" explanations hold.
I found [1], created all the way back in 2021, which seems to first introduce this "kidney disappointment" term, and I would have to assume that perhaps the authors preferred to translate it from their native language.
LLMs did not exist in their current form in 2021, so couldn't have used it to write down a coherent thought, let alone a paper, at the time.
At the same time, I do live in the same country as the authors, and while we don't speak the best English, being a student at a college without some familiarity of the English language to come up with the term "kidney disappointment" is, let's just say, hard to believe for me.
Edit: This other comment[2] made me realize what it might have been: plagiarism avoidance.
Unfortunately, many colleges here do not have the best reputation and often run like degree mills, and the aforementioned comment made me remember a conversation with a friend, who mentioned writing a review paper.
Again, LLMs were not really a thing at the time, so they mentioned how they had to run their paper through a plagiarism detection tool, and then they substituted words with their synonyms. I guess someone really did search for the word "failure" and found "disappointment" as an alternative.
LLMs were not available in 2021, but "Google translate" is much older.
Such translations were not unusual.
Around 2017 to 2019 I used a lot "Google translate", because it saved time despite its flaws, but there never was even a single sentence that I could let exactly as generated by "Google translate".
In each sentence I had to change at least a word or two, and many were hilarious. This was for translations between English and German. I assume that for other more distant languages the translations must have been much worse.
I had sent this an hour ago as a quote with a few others (lactose bigotry, of course the kidney disappointment) to someone via iMessage. The Apple Intelligence summary was unfortunately not screenshotted by them, but I am told it was a doozy...
That reminds me of an anecdote that my high school English teacher used to tell, as a way of cautioning against use of thesauruses: some student substituted "flatus" for "wind" in their composition, writing something like "a gentle flatus was blowing from the bay".
It seems like, particularly in scholarly works, we should cite AI contributions the same way we cite a third party, with similar consequences around plagiarism. If you’re copying AI whole hog, not quoting and citing it, and not catching basic failures. Is it really “your” work?
I accidentally did this myself not long ago. Like everyone else I'm tired of cookie banners so I had ChatGPT make a law against it, it used "act" in its version, I search-and-replaced it with "Law" before getting Claude to ratify it. Claude pointed out the search-and-replace replacement, oops. The conversation links are in my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48585778 and you can see Claude found these mistakes:
"
At some point an earlier find-and-replace swapped "act" for "Law" and garbled three real words. As written, the text says:
Section 1: "cookie-banner Lawions" — should be actions
Section 3(2)(b): "next ordinary feature update after enLawment" — should be enactment
Section 5(5): "a site-specific Law that the signal cannot satisfy" — should be act (or action)
These aren't stylistic quibbles; "Lawions" landing on the desks of four legal departments would cause real confusion about intent. The fix is a single reverse find-and-replace. With that correction, I'm comfortable signing.
"
It's very clear what's happening: they're passing it through a writing tool that has an "Auto-improve" feature the users click. This would do the naive, pre-LLM, trick of taking "repetitive" vocabulary and varying it using synonyms.
i kid you not, yesterday i was wondering what's the english word for bathroom scale, so i googled "pèse personne in english", and got answered "person weighs"
The translations from that Google Search widget are painfully literal given how searches are usually phrased. I can't believe they've put that in production.
Similarly, I find its AI tab useless because it has a hard time interpreting search phrasing. If I need to reword it I might as well switch to a chatbot.
"Kidney transplantation is a surgery to eliminate a sound, working kidney from a living or cerebrum dead giver and embed it into a patient with non-working kidneys.
Kidney transplantation is performed on patients with persistent kidney disappointment, or end-stage renal illness (ESRD). ESRD happens when a sickness or confusion harms the kidneys with the goal that they are presently not able to do satisfactorily eliminating liquids and squanders from the body or of keeping up with the legitimate level of specific kidney-directed synthetics in the circulatory system. Without long haul dialysis or a kidney relocate, ESRD is deadly."
I wonder if anyone else felt a somewhat "late 19th/early 20th-century" style in that paragraph; "sickness or confusion" and "liquids and squanders" stood out in particular.
In some languages disappointment does mean malfunction or problem. Like disappointment of stomach. Maybe they are using English words in papers instead of English language? Common for people whose English is not their first language.
Most of these are authored by what appear to be non-native English speakers. So, the most likely explanation is a translation issue.
In engineering literature from Russia from the 1960s, one sometimes finds references to a ‘water goat’ in papers that are otherwise about heavy machinery. It turns out this is a twice-translated rendition of ‘hydraulic ram’.
> engineering literature from Russia from the 1960s, one sometimes finds references to a ‘water goat’
Oh, that's where it comes from!
My dad told me something close when I was a kid, but according to him it was the early EU doing dictionary translation between English and French and getting "water sheep". I never could find it.
Through an unrelated anecdote, in my head this is now bound to the music of "smoke on the water", with a sheep impression for the guitar (bass?) — "Sheep on the water, ba baa baaah, ba ba ba baaah"
> It is widely believed that Carolino could not speak English and that an unknown French–English dictionary was used to translate the earlier Portuguese–French phrase book O novo guia da conversação em francês e português, written by José da Fonseca.
It became so popular for comedic reasons in the English-speaking world that it was reprinted many times and reviewed by Mark Twain.
<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>
I find this kind of free-phasing completely ridiculous. Just ask anyone that's had a kidney transfer that did not work out. I'm pretty sure they considered a failure, not just a disappointment.
In the spring semester this year my teacher friends said they were getting a lot of student work that was unusually well written compared to the student’s other work, but also contain unnatural typos throughout.
The students were using ChatGPT and thought they would trick the teacher by editing some typos in before submission.
The cheating market is moving fast. There are now tools you can use to rephrase LLM generated output until the Pangram score drops low enough.
Versions of this cat and mouse game have been going on for a long time. Before ChatGPT was a household name there was a market for simple paraphrasing tools that spammers would use to send variations of email text to try to delay pattern matching spam filters.
66 comments
[ 0.25 ms ] story [ 20.4 ms ] threadI found [1], created all the way back in 2021, which seems to first introduce this "kidney disappointment" term, and I would have to assume that perhaps the authors preferred to translate it from their native language.
LLMs did not exist in their current form in 2021, so couldn't have used it to write down a coherent thought, let alone a paper, at the time.
At the same time, I do live in the same country as the authors, and while we don't speak the best English, being a student at a college without some familiarity of the English language to come up with the term "kidney disappointment" is, let's just say, hard to believe for me.
Edit: This other comment[2] made me realize what it might have been: plagiarism avoidance.
Unfortunately, many colleges here do not have the best reputation and often run like degree mills, and the aforementioned comment made me remember a conversation with a friend, who mentioned writing a review paper.
Again, LLMs were not really a thing at the time, so they mentioned how they had to run their paper through a plagiarism detection tool, and then they substituted words with their synonyms. I guess someone really did search for the word "failure" and found "disappointment" as an alternative.
[1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Suprodip-Mandal/publica...
[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49319764
Such translations were not unusual.
Around 2017 to 2019 I used a lot "Google translate", because it saved time despite its flaws, but there never was even a single sentence that I could let exactly as generated by "Google translate".
In each sentence I had to change at least a word or two, and many were hilarious. This was for translations between English and German. I assume that for other more distant languages the translations must have been much worse.
In statistics: "tendency score matching" https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C5&q=%22t...
“Subsequently, 1 mL of the mass killing of an ethnic group was opposed to 20 mL of the skin sample and unprotected to light for 7 min.”
From: https://bsky.app/profile/forbetterscience.bsky.social/post/3...
“kissed the wall” was replaced with
“lost re-election”
in all the corpus I’m trying to use as training material right now
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?&q=%22renal+disappointmen...
Similarly, I find its AI tab useless because it has a hard time interpreting search phrasing. If I need to reword it I might as well switch to a chatbot.
https://blackwells.co.uk/bookshop/product/Handbook-of-Kidney...
https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=kidney+disappo...
Wolters Kluwer seems to be a real multinational company?
Funnily enough, your first link reports that the author of the book is "Kluwer, Wolters".
Being a real multinational company doesn't mean they've read the books published under their imprint.
In engineering literature from Russia from the 1960s, one sometimes finds references to a ‘water goat’ in papers that are otherwise about heavy machinery. It turns out this is a twice-translated rendition of ‘hydraulic ram’.
My favourite example of troubled blind translation is still "naked conductor runs under the carriage".
Oh, that's where it comes from!
My dad told me something close when I was a kid, but according to him it was the early EU doing dictionary translation between English and French and getting "water sheep". I never could find it.
Through an unrelated anecdote, in my head this is now bound to the music of "smoke on the water", with a sheep impression for the guitar (bass?) — "Sheep on the water, ba baa baaah, ba ba ba baaah"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/English_as_She_Is_Spoke
> It is widely believed that Carolino could not speak English and that an unknown French–English dictionary was used to translate the earlier Portuguese–French phrase book O novo guia da conversação em francês e português, written by José da Fonseca.
It became so popular for comedic reasons in the English-speaking world that it was reprinted many times and reviewed by Mark Twain.
https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C38&q=%22...
<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>
Guess why the acronym doesn't match. It's called chronic kidney disease (CKD). Yeah the acronym is wrong too.
The students were using ChatGPT and thought they would trick the teacher by editing some typos in before submission.
The cheating market is moving fast. There are now tools you can use to rephrase LLM generated output until the Pangram score drops low enough.
Versions of this cat and mouse game have been going on for a long time. Before ChatGPT was a household name there was a market for simple paraphrasing tools that spammers would use to send variations of email text to try to delay pattern matching spam filters.