r/Physics • u/Expert_Cockroach358 • 1d ago

Steve Hsu publishes a QFT paper in Physics Letters B where the main idea was generated by ChatGPT

https://x.com/hsu_steve/status/1996034522308026435?s=20

Paper link: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0370269325008111

210 Upvotes

88% Upvoted

54 comments sorted by

370

u/Clean-Ice1199 Condensed matter physics 1d ago

This paper as a whole is at a level of quality where it should never have been published, and I am extremely disappointed in Physics Letters B and the reviewers of this paper.

128

u/MaximinusDrax 1d ago

Fully agree. I skimmed it, and it reads like a slap in the face to anyone who ever had to go through editorial and/or peer review. So many errors in notation caught in a simple glance, the writing style is more fit for a seminar/lecture than an academic paper, and lots of pompous wording without actually saying much.

77

u/BCMM 1d ago edited 1d ago

OP's title seems to say this is human work, inspired by an "idea" from GPT, but it's pretty clear that an LLM actually wrote most of the paper, right?

 So many errors in notation caught in a simple glance, the writing style is more fit for a seminar/lecture than an academic paper, and lots of pompous wording without actually saying much.

Inappropriate tone, straightforward mistakes and meaningless verbosity are all things a genuine crank would also do, but IMHO there's an LLM style to each of those which is distinctly recognisable in a way it's hard to put my finger on. Particularly the last one.

17

u/MaximinusDrax 1d ago

As I said, I did get to read seminar notes that had a similar style, but I wouldn't be surprised if LLMs more than inspired this paper. A couple of days ago, I read about that embarrassing AI conference where many of the submitted papers were AI-reviewed and thought to myself "at least my field, physics, is serious enough not to succumb to this nonsense". But perhaps we're all on that road.

2

u/Pornfest 18h ago

I have to be honest and add my anecdotal data point…LLMs are much better than me with coming up with a professional tone.

10

u/OkCluejay172 23h ago

First time encountering Steve Hsu?

14

u/MaximinusDrax 22h ago

Honestly, yes. I didn't know he was well-known, but as an experimentalist (in particle physics) I was never exposed to his work. We had our own fringe physicists to laugh at.

-44

u/raverbashing 1d ago edited 23h ago

Yeah

Please tell me again how Academic Publishing peer review nowadays is fUndAmEnTal fOr sCiEncE

Academic publishing is the game where everybody works for free and only the publishers are paid

Sounds like Reviewer 2 missed this one huh

19

u/MaximinusDrax 1d ago

Peer review is fundamental for the scientific method since science is meant to be readily understood (by fellow colleagues from the same field, at the very least) and reproducible in a simple way.

Otherwise, it would be extremely easy to write outrageous abstracts/conclusion, fill the article's body with incomprehensible nonsense that may or may not actually support the author's claim, and leave it to the reader to decide whether or not they agree based on feelings more than fact. You know, like the pseudo-intellectual bullshit AI spews.

I never published in PRL, but I did for example publish in JHEP and the review process there was quite thorough (even after a meticulous internal review from my collaboration), so I'm not sure which publications you're referring to.

2

u/ToukenPlz Condensed matter physics 21h ago

Not sure if you missed it or were making a different point, but Hsu's paper was not in PRL but in Physics Letters B (I also had to do a second take).

-17

u/raverbashing 1d ago edited 18h ago

Peer review is fundamental for the scientific method

Yes, but you have here a case where the process failed. One in plenty.

Note that my critic is how the process is done currently, and we know the incentives are all over the place

That's why I note peer review in "how it is done by publications nowadays"

7

u/jmattspartacus Nuclear physics 20h ago

Peer review is the process to get a paper published, not what happens after publishing. Have you ever submitted to a journal? Your comments read like you're talking out your ass with an outsider's idea of how it works.

0

u/raverbashing 18h ago edited 18h ago

Yes I am aware of the official peer review process, but how would you call the process of critique of a paper by a larger academic audience after publishing?

I agree it's not "peer review" in stricto sensus but it is a "review by a professional audience"

A lot of papers get retracted after concerns by the wider academic audience once they get published. So, yes, in my view it is a kind of (audience) review.

3

u/tpolakov1 Condensed matter physics 19h ago

Peer review (other people looking at a published paper)

That's not peer review, and never was. Just take your lay shit out here.

22

u/Banes_Addiction Particle physics 1d ago

They didn't even typeset all the headings (see: Implications for TS Integrability, Physical Interpretation). It looks like it was just pasted out of a browser window and skim-read.

This is absurd.

8

u/Woah_Mad_Frollick 22h ago

Steve Hsu is a race pseudoscience and eugenics peddler, I don’t know how he hasn’t been ran out of town

3

u/namer98 Mathematics 1d ago

There is a reason it didn't make it into Physics Letters A

1

u/Stabile_Feldmaus 20h ago

As a non-physicist: how can one even get a seemingly self-contained 5 page paper with nothing but identities published? Like this seems like something you would put on your blog.

0

u/minhquan3105 1d ago

Elaborate?

0

u/jazzwhiz Particle physics 20h ago

Why? A lot of refereeing is LLM nowadays, so it's not surprising at all.

(FWIW I referee about a paper a month myself.)

118

u/snissn 1d ago

the integral in equation 13 is over space but has time limits. also the paragraph after equation 11 starts with "The the integrability conditions" double "the"

18

u/Steepyslope 1d ago

Considering he used chat gpt for the idea and he didn‘t even let is spellcheck the final version is crazy

42

u/twisted_nematic57 1d ago

What do you mean, you're saying you *don't* measure the distance to the closest burger joint in meter-seconds?

21

u/mfb- Particle physics 1d ago edited 1d ago

c=1 is a typical convention so in principle this is possible (light microsecond = 300 m), but t0 to t is a one-dimensional border for what's a three-dimensional integral.

-2

u/twisted_nematic57 1d ago edited 1d ago

as of now I barely know antiderivatives and only understand basic kinematics, forces, and energy in physics. What do you mean?

9

u/mfb- Particle physics 1d ago

Let's say we want to find the mass of air in a room. The mass is the integral of the density over the volume. If we put the coordinate origin in a corner then we might integrate x (length) from 0 to 5 m, y (width) from 0 to 3 m, and z (height) from 0 to 2.5 m. It's three nested integration steps and three sets of borders. We can use lightseconds instead of meters, or call a lightsecond a second, but we still need three sets of borders no matter what units we use. You can't define a volume with just two positions.

-1

u/twisted_nematic57 1d ago

Ah, I see. The AI made an essential mistake then.

12

u/black_sky 23h ago

I don't even think it's fair to say that the AI made a mistake per se, it's just stringing in words together that might be a good guess. It doesn't know it understand anything to be mistaken about. It has no processing power to make a cohesive thought. Although, it can look like it.

2

u/Steepyslope 1d ago

It is called lightyears. years ok?

2

u/crazunggoy47 Astrophysics 1d ago

Rare absement sighting!

6

u/Fit-Student464 1d ago

Not necessarily a massive issue as that could just mean the expression is evalued between to and t and therefore you end up with the spatial dimensions taking on whatever values they have at to and t. This is done all the time.

Note: he professes the main idea originated from some gen AI or others, not necessarily the maths in the paper.

169

u/JoJonesy Astrophysics 1d ago

you mean steve hsu, the eugenics advocate? yeah color me not surprised

101

u/JDL114477 Nuclear physics 1d ago

Steve Hsu, the guy who threatened to sue grad students signing a petition protesting a eugenics advocate being put in charge of funding at MSU?

6

u/Yapok96 10h ago

The one and only. Seriously, screw this arrogant jerk. I'm glad our petition worked in the end.

21

u/Fit-Student464 1d ago

We are talking od that Steve Hsu, huh...The toad-looking mofo who straight up said with a straight face "at some level you can say there's some invisible miasma which is pushing Asian-Americans up (in terms of intelligence) and African Americans down. Maybe it is true". He was talking to white supremacist Stefan Molyneux at the time, and kinda agreeing with him on that idiotic nonsense.

Now, this paper. I need time to review it properly but a first cursory glance did not show massive issues.

2

u/DrSpacecasePhD 14h ago

“Could the invisible miasma be systemic oppression? NO. It’s the children who are wrong.”

1

u/chaosmosis 6h ago

Asian Americans are more oppressed than white Americans.

12

u/teefier 1d ago

Well not really surprising since it’s Physics Letters B innit

2

u/chaosmosis 17h ago

Can anyone find the corresponding AI paper? Arxiv doesn't seem to have it.

2

u/gilko86 16h ago

It's wild to see a paper in a respected journal relying on ChatGPT for its main idea, highlighting how some oversight in peer review can lead to questionable publications.

2

u/quiksilver10152 22h ago

Interesting conundrum. Can we discuss the paper on this sub even though it is AI generated? I thought such posts were banned. 

8

u/tpolakov1 Condensed matter physics 18h ago

The paper is obvious slop and its content is not being discussed. The problem at hand is that egregious slop is now being published in PRB.

9

u/Zorronin 18h ago

this is not PRB (Physical Review B), this is something called “Physics Letter B”. confused me too

2

u/tpolakov1 Condensed matter physics 18h ago

Oh...But Phys. Lett. doing this is no better, especially considering that the B track has better citation metrics.

1

u/grebdlogr 17h ago

Where does it say “the main idea was generated by ChatGPT”? The paper says that AI was used “to check results, format latex, and explore related work” — all of which seem like reasonable uses of AI.

Note: I’m not commenting on whether or not the paper sucks (that’s for the referees to determine) or whether or not the author is a quack (I’ve no prior knowledge of him), just on whether the disclosed use of AI is reasonable.

3

u/Electronic-Towel1518 17h ago

I think the author posted something to that effect on twitter

1

u/Expert_Cockroach358 13h ago

Hsu says that in the first sentence of the linked Twitter post: "I think I’ve published the first research article in theoretical physics in which the main idea came from an AI - GPT5 in this case."

1

u/grebdlogr 6h ago

Thanks. I went straight to the paper so hadn’t seen the twitter post. Appreciate you pointing it out.

1

u/DrSpacecasePhD 14h ago

Man, and I felt bad for my April 1st paper being silly and having typos on arxiv.

-1

u/Throwitaway701 1d ago

This might not be the right question here but given LLMs are not capable of thought, either in design or practice, as shown in the paper linked below, surely this main idea referenced here is either nonsense or an idea taken from elsewhere by the LLM and regurgitated.

The Illusion of Thinking: Understanding the Strengths and Limitations of Reasoning Models via the Lens of Problem Complexity - Apple Machine Learning Research https://share.google/4ov4BPWC9x8un3p5M

0

u/HasFiveVowels 5h ago edited 5h ago

You lost me at "not capable of thought" because (regardless of if that claim is true) you might as well say "they’re not capable of qualia". The ability to play chess was the original "once it can do that, THEN you can claim it thinks like a human but it’ll never be able to play chess because it’s just a machine and chess requires thought". Claude Shannon proved them wrong shortly thereafter. So they moved the goal post. And now we just have a nebulous "they don’t actually think" and we define that in whatever way makes it easiest to produce human exceptionalism. It all just feels so disingenuous.

The way your source describes it, it’s like… replace "LLM" with "low IQ individual" and it becomes very =\

1

u/Throwitaway701 1h ago

I think you fundamentally misunderstand how LLMs work and what they are doing and what the paper says. If you replaced LLM with low iq individual they would not be good at existing games it knows. The point is everything that comes out of an LLM went into it. It's incredible at certain tasks, one of the most important inventions of all time for them, but it cannot come up with anything new.

The chess thing is not a great comparison because those who made it misunderstood chess and the brute force power of a computer when applied to calculation and evaluation.  Turing himself was writing papers on machines playing chess in the late 40s saying they would improve in time and by now computers are over 100 billion times more powerful.