- papers are written by AI (as pointed out in this article, and as obvious to anyone who spends a while actually reading recent AI research)
- papers are reviewed by AI (NeurIPS is doing an AI assisted review experiment - https://neurips.cc/Conferences/2026/ai-reviewing-experiment - and I feel the trend is moving towards AI reviewers whether we like it or not)
- papers are read, summarized and digested by AI, because there are just so many papers at leading AI conferences that nobody has time to eyeball them all
We are very rapidly automating humans out of the academic publication loop here.
We are nowhere near AI being able to judge the quality of research (in fact, one might reasonably state that even most humans can't really judge the quality of research). Most things in society are not like math: we can't automate (via verification) our way out of noise overwhelming the signal.
Folks are willing to entirely abuse the public resource that is faithful, honest reviewing. (This is unsurprising; the abuse of the commons / public resources has been rising for a long time). There isn't a good solution other than something akin to draconian social scoring to limit access to the reviewing system.
This is a legitimate question: should people have reputations? Should their behavior be made more visible publicly, both good and bad? How?
In a small contained society, where consequences are more directly affecting individuals immedately, these questions don't need to be asked, because they're inherantly answered. We now are a society with billions of people, and dire consequences sometimes deferred for a generation, or more. Part of our general failing is the lack of good answers to the above questions. For many people, there are rarely negative consequences for causing harm to others, and the rewards can be very great indeed.
I may generate slop from time to time, but I do my best to keep it to myself.
They should consider swapping this for a log plot.
I can imagine in 2027 academia looking like Moltbook.
If all these papers were not gatekept by journals, it would be trivially easy to validate at least the existence of cited papers and quotes.
Checking the content is of course a lot more difficult, but that doesn't magically become trivial with open-access journals: you still need to read and interpret what is being said in the paper and compare it to the claims being made in the citation. Granted, these days you could use AI for a first pass, but it's still going to be incredibly tedious work.
From my perspective, it's a clear manifestation of humanity's most pervasive failing - the one that defines every group, eventually.
No One Anywhere Wants To Clean Their Own House.Alas, it's probably just wishful thinking on my part.
I do wonder what truthfully could be on ai verification, if even one paper with such an error is accepted it sets the precedent you hopefully get lucky to not get caught (then again verifying for basic tells isn't the same verifying is this genuinely a worthwhile publication, but that's a separate matter)
What? I mean who does this. My voice is my voice and it's literally never occurred to me to have an LLM do a first draft. I thought that was college kid stuff.