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AI Search, Solar Activity, Papermills, and Some Personal News...
This week’s science bits from SWTG
Marcus Gee-Lim
September 24, 2025
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Be Careful with AI Search Tools
Image: Narayanan et al, arXiv:2509.04499
A new study from Salesforce AI Research tested AI search engines — including OpenAI’s GPT-5, Microsoft’s Bing, and Perplexity – for accuracy, and found that all of them frequently make statements that are not supported by the sources they quote. While GPT-5 does reasonably well, Perplexity’s DeepResearch basically can’t produce anything without serious mistakes. Then again, the researchers used AI to score the accuracy of the answers, so who knows what this really means.
Personally, I’ve found that the problems with AI search are most obvious when the search engine has to deal with quotes. These models will frequently attribute text written by an article’s author as a quote to a person, or confuse statements of one person with those of another. I have recently seen people attribute false quotes to me that were actually statements made by other people about me… on Reddit. Paper here.
In other news, I am no longer affiliated with the Munich Center for Mathematical Philosophy. I have been informed that the administration there does not like the “public perception” of my “formulations.” I shiver at the thought of what scientists go through who actually talk about controversial topics.
The Sun’s Weak Spell is Over, Say NASA Scientists
Image: NASA
The Sun has changed course. Researchers from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory report that after two decades of steady weakening, the solar wind began strengthening again in 2008. By comparing spacecraft data from 2008 to 2025, they find that solar wind density rose by about 26%, temperature by 29%, and dynamic pressure by 34%. Even the interplanetary magnetic field grew by more than 30%.
This means that the unusually weak solar cycle 24 was likely an outlier, not the start of a centuries-long lull (like the Maunder or Dalton minima that once cooled Earth’s climate). Still, today’s solar wind is weaker than it was in the late 20th century, so the recovery is incomplete. Whether the Sun continues to strengthen or levels off in coming cycles remains an open question, but the new data show that talk of an imminent “modern minimum” was premature. Paper here. Press release here.
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Papermill Network Busted in Europe
Image: Scientific Literature, Artist’s Impression
“Papermills” are a growing problem in academia. These are networks of brokers who sell authorship on scam papers or citations. This problem originated in China and India, but in the past years it has spread West. Just a few weeks ago, a particularly large European papermill network was busted, which operated out of Ukraine. It had reportedly sold more than 1,500 papers from 2017 to 2025, involving more than 4,500 authors. This comes just a few months after a former student of the university of Manchester was found running a papermill and two Hungarian postdocs were found to have published with a papermill, though they claim it was an accident.
