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Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written by AI

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Re: Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written by AI

#121

Post by TomasBM »

I haven't come across any reviews that I could recognize as having been blatantly LLM-generated.

However, almost every peer review I was a part of, pre- and post-LLM, had one reviewer who provided a questionable review. Sometimes I'd wonder if they'd even read the submission, and sometimes, there were borderline unethical practices like trying to farm citations through my submission. Luckily, at least one other diligent reviewer would provide a counterweight.

Safe to say that I don't find it surprising, and hearing / reading others' experiences tells me it's yet another symptom of a barely functioning mechanism that is peer review today.

Sadly, it's the best mechanism that institutions are willing to support.

Re: Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written by AI

#122

Post by [deleted] »

maxspero wrote: post #71
slashdave wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"proof" was an unfortunate phrase to use. However, a proper statistical analysis can be objective. And these kinds of tools are perfectly suited to such an analysis.

Yeah, Pangram does not provide any concrete proof, but it confirms many people's suspicions about their reviews. But it does flag reviews for a human to take a closer look and see if the review is flawed, low-effort, or contains major hallucinations.

[deleted]

Re: Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written by AI

#124

Post by insin »

jsrozner wrote: post #44

There is a lot of dislike for AI detection in these comments. Pangram labs (PL) claims very low false positive rates. Here's their own blog post on the research: https://www.pangram.com/blog/pangram-predicts-21-of-iclr-rev... I increasingly see AI generated slop across the internet - on twitter, nytimes comments, blog/substack posts from smart people. Most of it is obvious AI garbage and it's really f*ing annoying. I…

My daughter had an essay to write for her one of her uni modules this semester, and they're giving students access to whatever tool they're using to detect LLM-generated essays.

The thought of thousands of people having to do what she had to do is depressing. I was sitting in the room with her while she wrote it, submitted it for checking, "AI" detected! She found the only way to avoid this was to go over it again and again simplifying and dumbing it down to use very basic sentence structures which ended up reading like something from a primary schooler. The whole thing is ass-backwards.

Re: Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written by AI

#125

Post by slashdave »

h00kwurm wrote: post #84
slashdave wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is soundly unfair and unjustified to extrapolate the ML community to all professions. What is happening in the ML world is the exception, not the norm, and not some fundamental failing of society.

I don’t think it’s an extrapolation from the ML community into other industries. This evolution of society is objectively happening - artisanship, care for the work beyond capital gain, and commitment to depth in a focused category - are diminishing and harder to find qualities. I’d probably label it related to capital and material social economics. It’s perhaps more unfair and unjustified to not recognize this as a…

It's a poor extrapolation. The issues with the ML community have more to do with the exponential growth of the "AI" industry, the resulting flow of capital, and the outsized role these conferences provide for establishing a researchers value to the industry. These conditions are fairly unique.

I would propose that the evolution you speak of is more related to our technology (and I am not just saying AI, far from it) and how it is now possible to perform the very minimum requirements of a task with little effort.

Re: Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written by AI

#126

Post by bjourne »

Jensson wrote: post #43
getnormality wrote: post #17

I wouldn't be surprised if the headline is accurate, but AI detectors are widely understood to be unreliable, and I see no evidence that this AI detector has overcome the well-deserved stigma.

The conference papers were 1%, peer reviews 20%, is there another reason for that big difference than more of the peer reviews being AI generated than the papers themselves? We can't use this to convict a single reviewer, but we can almost surely say that many reviewers just gave the review work to an AI.

Peer reviews are much shorter than papers. A bad review may only be six to eight sentences along the lines of "Math is confusing" and "Too little related work". 20% AI generated seems high if for no other reason than writing a bad review takes very little effort.

Re: Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written by AI

#128

Post by slashdave »

Loughla wrote: post #102
immibis wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just yesterday I saw this YouTube rant from someone called Jaiden Animations, about how everything is just shit now. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NBZv0_MImIY She opens with an example of a bank. She walked in and asked for a debit card. The teller told her to take a seat. 30 minutes later, the teller told her the bank doesn't issue debit cards. Firstly, what kind of bank doesn't issue debit cards, and secondly, wh…

It's because people are commodities now. Human resources exists to manage the shuffle between warm bodies. It's back to OP's point. There's no such thing as professions now. Just jobs. We put them on and off like hats. With that churn comes lack of institutional knowledge and a rule set handed down from the C Suite for front line employees completely detached from the front line work. Enshitification run rampant.

> It's because people are commodities now.

Nothing like the textile mills of the 1900s. You'll need to do better.

Re: Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written by AI

#129

Post by h00kwurm »

slashdave wrote: post #125
h00kwurm wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don’t think it’s an extrapolation from the ML community into other industries. This evolution of society is objectively happening - artisanship, care for the work beyond capital gain, and commitment to depth in a focused category - are diminishing and harder to find qualities. I’d probably label it related to capital and material social economics. It’s perhaps more unfair and unjustified to not recognize this as a…

It's a poor extrapolation. The issues with the ML community have more to do with the exponential growth of the "AI" industry, the resulting flow of capital, and the outsized role these conferences provide for establishing a researchers value to the industry. These conditions are fairly unique. I would propose that the evolution you speak of is more related to our technology (and I am not just saying AI, far from it)…

I don’t disagree that technology is allowing a new low bar for minimal allowable effort. This is true in a world where the same technology could enable one to deliver amazing things. I’m speaking more generally and I think you describe the exact problem in your clarification which boils down to “people are chasing money and doing whatever it takes in ML, where the money currently is”. I was stopping at the fact that “people […] chasing money and doing whatever it takes” has become the general personal pursuit, quality/depth/care be damned.

Re: Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written by AI

#130

Post by intended »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #16

This is the kind of situation where everything sucks. You'd think that one of the biggest AI conference out there would have seen this coming. On the one hand (and the most important thing, IMO) it's really bad to judge people on the basis of "AI detectors", especially when this can have an impact on their career. It's also used in education, and that sucks even more. AI detectors have bad rates, can't detect concent…

You don’t fix this.

Humans optimize for effort.

We have expanded the market for lemons.

People can say they are doing the work, use AI, and offload testing on the other party.

Buyers will respond by moving their purchase price down. People selling quality content will realize they don’t have a chance to get the fair value and exit the market.

Anyone arguing otherwise, needs to explain how, or who, is going to handle the added burden of verification that has been foisted on all of society.

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