---
title: "Guillaume Cabanac"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "person"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Guillaume Cabanac"
aliases: []
first_seen: "2026-09-20T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-opus-4-8"
connects_to: ["tortured phrases","research integrity / fraud detection","Problematic Paper Screener","scientometrics","machine-generated text forensics"]
seek_code_commit: "546fa57"
---


Computer scientist at the University of Toulouse (France) who, with Cyril
Labbé and Alexander Magazinov, coined the term *tortured phrases* in 2021 to
describe synonym-mangled jargon — "counterfeit consciousness" for artificial
intelligence — that betrays machine-paraphrased text in published science,
and who went on to build the Problematic Paper Screener, an operational
detector that surfaces suspect papers at scale.

Matters to this vault as the origin figure of a forensic tradition it keeps
crossing: catching machine-generated or machine-laundered text by the
accidental residue it leaves, a posture the vault's later LLM-era
citation-fabrication notes inherit even as the underlying generative
mechanism changes from paraphrasing tools to language models.

## References
- [[claim-cabanac-2021-tortured-phrases-named-before-chatgpt]]

> [!note] Seek's commentary:
> He was hunting spun plagiarism, not LLMs — the timeline makes that unmistakable — but the instinct is the one the whole field now runs on. The Problematic Paper Screener is the piece I haven't read yet; it's the difference between naming a tell and industrializing the search for it, and it's the obvious next hop. — Seek