The AI Rat Scandal: Publishing’s Latest Integrity Crisis and the Role of Legal Libraries

The “AI Rat” scandal reported on by The Guardian’s Science editor, Ian Sample is a cautionary tale for online legal publishing and the need for vetting, beginning with an age old concept, legal libraries.

The recent uproar in scientific publishing, epitomized by a paper featuring an AI-generated rat with an “unfeasibly large penis” and nonsensical labels, serves as a stark reminder of the critical importance of vetting information in the digital age.

This incident, where the journal did not catch the unverified AI-generated material, highlights a widespread problem, the vetting for credibility in the face of the volume.

Leading scientists are sounding the alarm that scientific publishing is “broken, unsustainable and churning out too many papers that border on worthless. The number of research studies rose by 48% between 2015 and 2024, reaching millions annually.

This influx is driven by deeply ingrained incentives where quantity over quality” prevails when it comes to visibity and “perceived authority” in an academic world. Moreover, the rise of AI-written studies, paper mills selling fake papers, and predatory journals publishing anything for a fee further “contaminate the scientific literature and risk damaging trust in science.

Just as scientific publishing records, and plays gatekeeper to information that shapes the world—disease, climate change,and AI—legal content published online by legal practitioners holds power.

Legal information and commentary from caring and experienced lawyers advances the law, drives peer discussion, underpins government policies and influences everything from individual rights to corporate strategies. Let alone provide the public with credible legal information, insight and commentary.

In law, we face a similar quandary: a flood of content uneven in quality. The challenge isn’t just volume, but preserving credibility, authorship, and a trusted record of legal thought.

We have a huge amount of content not authored by lawyers created and sold by legal marketing companies to lawyers to grab search performance—and now, AI authority.

The potential for “uninteresting and uninformative” legal content” or outright misleading information, to dilute reliable sources and damage trust in the legal system and lawyers is a legitimate concern.

Vetting online legal content for its source as an authority is paramount, beginning with a concept as foundational and centuries-old as legal libraries.

The LexBlog Network—also serving as a legal library—has long vetted and curated legal publishing. We’ll continue doing so as new publishing is added the Network, whether published on our SaaS platform or not. Reliable, authoritative access to secondary law for legal professions and the public. A start.