I coauthored 4 papers this Summer. All bona fide: no AI slop, no fake data, all genuine research papers. But the substance of each is barely enough for a paragraph in a paper I would have gladly written instead.
But I have KPIs. And KPIs don't care about quality, quality is unaccountable. So it is in my best interest to publish a lot of "barely science" instead of spending a year or two writing a good paper that will take another year to publish, and by then my contract will end, and I'll have no numbers to show.
I can't even imagine the horrors what papers on some Master thesis would look like. Often as there is so many graduates they are not that novel topics anyway.
And if you play by the spirit and not by the rules, you're fucked. Because, with masters, it takes about a year to get to the first publishable result, and about a year to publish it in a respected journal. And that's the happy pass. You might get an extra rejection, or fall into the back of the publishing queue. This could cost you three or six month easily.
The masters program in our uni is 1.5 years long.
If an AI just randomly throws out domain specific words without that domain's specific meaning, it becomes very painful for everybody to read, and worse still adds a level of ambiguity that defeats the whole purpose of that academic writing in the first place.
Look at some from earlier than mid 80s or so, they are so much better.
regardless of whether they are or not, the speed at which they can be cranked out with the help of LLMs, means that the signal to noise ratio is getting lower by the day, and soon it might be hard to find any signal. The outcome I worry about is it destroying confidence in academic publishing (which is already suffering from a lack of confidence).
The signal to noise on ArXiv has always been a problem, due to open access and no peer review, and now AI has completely buried the signal. As with everything else, I now have to assume everything is shit without some other signal of quality; when I stumble on a project on github, if the developer has no software made before 2025, I'm leaving. It's not worth my time to try to find out whether they're a slop merchant or they know how computers work. Same with writing; I have begun to assume all new writers are shoveling slop at me.
I don't like that I have to be so suspicious. I'd rather take in the world with an open mind, but I can't afford it. I have limited time on this earth (I mean it, I'm feeling my age, I'm not wasting my one brief life on reading something somebody shat out on a whim).
This is an example expressed using llm :)