151–160 of 543 posts
in the end we're going to end up with papers written by AI, proofread by AI .....summarized for readers by AI. I think this is just for them to remain relevant and be seen as still pushing something out
From my perspective as a journal editor and a reviewer these kinds of tools cause many more problems than they actually solve. They make the 'barrier to entry' for submitting vibed semi-plausible journal articles much lower, which I understand some may see as a benefit. The drawback is that scientific editors and reviewers provide those services for free, as a community benefit. One example was a submission their und…
Is it at all possible to have a policy that bans the submission of any AI written text, or text that was written with the assistance of AI tools? I understand that this would, by necessity, be under an "honor system" but maybe it could help weed out papers not worth the time?
the early years of LLMs (when they were good enough to correct grammar but not enough to generate entire slop papers) were an equalizer. we may end up here but it would be unfortunate.
As other top level posters have indicated the review portion of this is the limiting factor
unless journal reviewers decide to utilize entirely automated review process, then they’re not gonna be able to keep up with what will increasingly be the most and best research coming out of any lab.
So whoever figures out the automated reviewer that can actually tell fact from fiction, is going to win this game.
I expect over the longest period, that’s probably not going to be throwing more humans at the problem, but agreeing on some kind of constraint around autonomous reviewers.
If not that then labs will also produce products and science will stop being in public and the only artifacts will be whatever is produced in the market
Lots of players in this space.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I wonder if there's a way to tax the frivolous submissions. There could be a submission fee that would be fully reimbursed iff the submission is actually accepted for publication. If you're confident in your paper, you can think of it as a deposit. If you're spamming journals, you're just going to pay for the wasted time. Maybe you get reimbursed for half as long as there are no obvious hallucinations.
Pay to review is common in Econ and Finance.
Suppose you are an independent researcher writing a paper. Before submitting it for review to journals, you could hire a published author in that field to review it for you (independently of the journal), and tell you whether it is submission-worthy, and help you improve it to the point it was. If they wanted, they could be listed as coauthor, and if they don't want that, at least you'd acknowledge their assistance in the paper.
Because I think there are two types of people who might write AI slop papers: (1) people who just don't care and want to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks; (2) people who genuinely desire to seriously contribute to the field, but don't know what they are doing. Hiring an advisor could help the second group of people.
Of course, I don't know how willing people would be to be hired to do this. Someone who was senior in the field might be too busy, might cost too much, or might worry about damage to their own reputation. But there are so many unemployed and underemployed academics out there...
From my perspective as a journal editor and a reviewer these kinds of tools cause many more problems than they actually solve. They make the 'barrier to entry' for submitting vibed semi-plausible journal articles much lower, which I understand some may see as a benefit. The drawback is that scientific editors and reviewers provide those services for free, as a community benefit. One example was a submission their und…
GenAI largely seems like a DDoS on free resources. The effort to review this stuff is now massively more than the effort to "create" it, so really what is the point of even submitting it, the reviewer could have generated it themself. Seeing it in software development where coworkers are submitting massive PRs they generated but hardly read or tested. Shifting the real work to the PR review. I'm not sure what the fin…
> The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.
EDIT: as corrected by comment, Prisma is not Vercel, but ©2026 Prisma Data, Inc. -- curiosity still persists(?)
From my perspective as a journal editor and a reviewer these kinds of tools cause many more problems than they actually solve. They make the 'barrier to entry' for submitting vibed semi-plausible journal articles much lower, which I understand some may see as a benefit. The drawback is that scientific editors and reviewers provide those services for free, as a community benefit. One example was a submission their und…
GenAI largely seems like a DDoS on free resources. The effort to review this stuff is now massively more than the effort to "create" it, so really what is the point of even submitting it, the reviewer could have generated it themself. Seeing it in software development where coworkers are submitting massive PRs they generated but hardly read or tested. Shifting the real work to the PR review. I'm not sure what the fin…
I don't doubt the AI companies will soon announce products that will claim to solve this very problem, generating turnkey submission reviews. Double-dipping is very profitable.
It appears LLM-parasitism isn't close to being done, and keeps finding new commons to spoil.