alt Hacker NewsAre you explaining this from experience or from speculation?
I can tell you that it doesn't match my own experience. I also think it doesn't match your example. Those cases of verified image fraud are typically part of replication efforts. The reason the fraud is able to persist is due to the lack of replication, not the abundance of it.
Mostly experience (based on being a PhD scientist, a postdoc, a National Lab scientist, and engineer at several bigtech companies), partly speculation (none of the groups/labs I worked in operated at "the highest level", but I worked adjacent to many of those).
I'm pretty sure most image fraud went completely unrealized even in the case of replication failure. It looks like (pre AI) it was mostly a few folks who did it as a hobby, unrelated to their regular jobs/replication work.