This is a really confusing one, since neither the "AI generated paper" nor "translation issue" explanations hold.

I found [1], created all the way back in 2021, which seems to first introduce this "kidney disappointment" term, and I would have to assume that perhaps the authors preferred to translate it from their native language.

LLMs did not exist in their current form in 2021, so couldn't have used it to write down a coherent thought, let alone a paper, at the time.

At the same time, I do live in the same country as the authors, and while we don't speak the best English, being a student at a college without some familiarity of the English language to come up with the term "kidney disappointment" is, let's just say, hard to believe for me.

Edit: This other comment[2] made me realize what it might have been: plagiarism avoidance.

Unfortunately, many colleges here do not have the best reputation and often run like degree mills, and the aforementioned comment made me remember a conversation with a friend, who mentioned writing a review paper.

Again, LLMs were not really a thing at the time, so they mentioned how they had to run their paper through a plagiarism detection tool, and then they substituted words with their synonyms. I guess someone really did search for the word "failure" and found "disappointment" as an alternative.

[1] https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Suprodip-Mandal/publica...

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49319764

It fits the "naive deplagiarization" explanation perfectly, however. Many of them are pre-LLM, when people had to plagiarize things the good old-fashioned way, and subsequently hide that fact via synonym replacement.

LLMs were not available in 2021, but "Google translate" is much older.

Such translations were not unusual.

Around 2017 to 2019 I used a lot "Google translate", because it saved time despite its flaws, but there never was even a single sentence that I could let exactly as generated by "Google translate".

In each sentence I had to change at least a word or two, and many were hilarious. This was for translations between English and German. I assume that for other more distant languages the translations must have been much worse.

Could it just be neural translation? It existed since the mid 2010s.

Google Translate has existed since way back then. I remember seeing hilarious posts about bizarre translations from Chinese and other languages in the 2010s.

I wonder if something similar is happening, except people are using AI detection tools and then substituting words.

Never heard of a content spinner?