If I steal hundreds of thousands of dollars (salary, plus research grants and other funds) and produce fake output, what do you think is appropriate?
To me, it's no different than stealing a car or tricking an old lady into handing over her fidelity account. You are stealing, and society says stealing is a criminal act.
The claim is that this would qualify as fraud, which is also illegal.
If you do a search for "contractor imprisoned for fraud" you'll find plenty of cases where a private contract dispute resulted in criminal convictions for people who took money and then didn't do the work.
I don't know if taking money and then merely pretending to do the research would rise to the level of criminal fraud, but it doesn't seem completely outlandish.
Stealing more than a few thousand dollars is a felony, and felonies are handled in criminal court, not civil.
EDIT - The threshold amount varies. Sometimes it's as low as a few hundred dollars. However, the point stands on its own, because there's no universe where the sum in question is in misdemeanor territory.
It would fall under the domain of contract law, because maybe the contract of the grant doesn't prohibit what the researcher did. The way to determine that would be in court - civil court.
Most institutions aren't very chill with grant money being misused, so we already don't need to burden then state with getting Johnny muncipal prosecutor to try and figure out if gamma crystallization imaging sources were incorrect.
Fraud implies intent, either intent to deceive or intentionally negligent.
If you're taking public funds (directly or otherwise) with the intent to either:
A) Do little to no real work, and pass of the work of an AI as being your own work, or
B) Knowingly publish falsified data
Then you are, without a single shred of doubt, in criminal fraud territory. Further, the structural damage you inflict when you do the above is orders of magnitude greater than the initial fraud itself. That is a matter for civil courts ("Our company based on development on X fraudulent data, it cost us Y in damages").
Whether or not charges are pressed is going to happen way after all the internal reviews have demonstrated the person being charged has gone beyond the "honest mistake" threshold. It's like Walmart not bothering to call the cops until you're into felony territory, there's no point in doing so.
Only when we can arrest people who say dumb stuff on the internet too. Much like how trump and bubba (bill Clinton) should share a jail cell, those who pontificate about what they don’t know about (I.e non academics critiquing academia) can sit in the same jail cell as the supposed criminal academics.
You gotta horse trade if you want to win. Take one for the team or get out of the way.
Non-academics can definitely offer valid critiques of academia.
You don't need to be in academia to understand that scientific progress depends on trust. If you don't trust the results people are publishing, you can't then build upon them. Reproducibility has been a known issue for a long time[0], and is widely agreed upon to be a 'crisis' by academics[1].
The advent of an easier way to publish correct-looking papers, or to plagiarize and synthesize other works without actually validating anything is only going to further diminish trust.
