SYNTHETIC IMAGES, SYNTHETIC TRUTHS: MIT RESEARCHER ASKS “WILL AI MAKE ME F@#KING OBSOLETE?”

In a stunning revelation that has rocked the scientific community to its core, MIT science photographer Felice Frankel has dared to question whether her entire career might be rendered useless by the rise of pixel-hallucinating algorithms that can create perfect quantum crystal photos without ever needing to know what the hell quantum crystals actually are.

PHOTOGRAPHER WORRIED AI MIGHT STEAL HER JOB, UNLIKE LITERALLY EVERYONE ELSE WHO’S TOTALLY CALM ABOUT IT

Frankel, who has spent over 30 years making scientists’ boring petri dishes look Instagram-worthy, expressed concern in Nature magazine that generative AI might eventually replace her skilled human touch with something created by what essentially amounts to a very convincing bullsh!t machine.

“I deleted a petri dish digitally once and felt guilty enough to confess it in writing,” Frankel explained. “Meanwhile, these silicon thought-rectangles are out here fabricating entire laboratories that don’t exist and nobody bats an eye.”

ETHICS SCHMETHICS: JUST SLAP A LABEL ON IT AND CALL IT A DAY

When asked about ethical guidelines for AI-generated research visuals, Frankel suggested a revolutionary approach: actually telling people when you’ve made sh!t up. This groundbreaking concept—known as “honesty” in some fringe academic circles—involves clearly labeling AI-generated images and disclosing which model and prompts were used.

“The image is merely a representation of the thing, and not the thing itself,” Frankel stated, accidentally summarizing both quantum mechanics and the entire philosophy behind OnlyFans in a single sentence.

STUDENTS ALTERING REALITY TO MATCH THEIR HYPOTHESES? SHOCKING!

In what should surprise absolutely no one, Frankel recounted how a student once altered one of her images without permission to better match what they wanted to show. The student apparently missed the irony that falsifying scientific imagery is exactly the kind of behavior that would get them immediately hired by pharmaceutical marketing departments.

DR. MAKES-STUFF-UP WEIGHS IN

“What we’re seeing is the natural evolution of academic dishonesty,” explains Dr. Fabrica Tion, Director of the Institute for Pretending Things Are Better Than They Actually Are. “In the old days, scientists had to physically manipulate their experiments to get the desired results. Now they can just type ‘show me what I want to see’ into DALL-E and voilà! Nobel Prize material!”

VISUAL LITERACY: THE CRAZY IDEA THAT SCIENTISTS SHOULD UNDERSTAND THEIR OWN PICTURES

Perhaps most alarming is Frankel’s radical suggestion that MIT—a university known for producing people who can code interstellar navigation systems but can’t make eye contact—should require students to develop visual literacy alongside their writing skills.

“Most readers of scientific articles go right to the figures after reading the abstract,” Frankel noted, accidentally revealing science’s dirty little secret that nobody actually reads the methodology sections.

SURVEY SAYS: 87% OF SCIENTISTS JUST WANT PRETTY PICTURES

An entirely made-up survey conducted by this publication found that 87% of scientists don’t actually care if their visualizations are accurate as long as they look cool enough to get them tenure. The remaining 13% were too busy Photoshopping their Western blots to respond.

According to Professor Idon Givadamn from the Department of Just Making It Look Nice, “The scientific community has always operated on a ‘pics or it didn’t happen’ basis. Now with AI, we can ensure everything happened, whether it did or not!”

In a final desperate attempt to prove her continued relevance, Frankel used an AI diffusion model to create an image of Moungi Bawendi’s nano crystals, which turned out looking “cartoon-like” and unrealistic—much like the average scientist’s understanding of proper work-life balance.

At press time, this entire article was being rewritten by ChatGPT to include more references to quantum entanglement and fewer jokes about scientists’ social awkwardness, because apparently THAT’S where we draw the ethical line.