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And yet, if your article gets rejected when you write it yourself, and gets published when you have AI rewrite it for you to use all the right buzzwords based o

And yet, if your article gets rejected when you write it yourself, and gets published when you have AI rewrite it for you to use all the right buzzwords based on previously published articles -- that's a good (financial) reason to use AI for writing.

jrimbault 3y ago
Fascinating how we (society) have let KPIs get into research/education and healthcare.
- oefrha 3y ago
  Research inherently requires attention and attention is inherently scarce, so unfortunately people do and will compete for attention however they can, metrics or not.
- JumpCrisscross 3y ago
  > let KPIs get into research/education and healthcare Research, sure, that’s a creative profession. But education and healthcare have obviously measurable outcomes, some of which are predictably desired ex ante.
  - jrimbault 3y ago
    The implicit here is "business/for profit" KPIs.
- godelski 3y ago
  This is why I've started to argue against "peer review." Because no one can decide a paper's correctness/legitimacy by sitting down and reading the work. The method just doesn't scale and certainly doesn't in settings that are zero sum like conferences (see the absolute shitshow that is ML peer review). It's become a entire waste of time and money. The alternative I suggest is just submitting works to Open Review so there can be open discussions on the works. It removes the hostility from the setting and self biases towards reviewers/commenters being parties that are experts in that sub-niche as they're going to tend to be the only ones reading those papers, and especially reading closely. Metrics are fucking hard and we don't improve systems by removing nuance from metrics. Yet as complexity has increased in our world, this has seemed to be the direction we've gone. It's bad for science and the current methods have far too many false negatives (improper rejects) and false positives (improper accepts) to validate it as a meaningful signal. We've tried so many ways to fix it while maintaining the institution that it's time to just try letting go of it. I honestly cannot find a great argument for keeping these journals around (yes, there are arguments, but not many ,,strong,, arguments, and specifically ones that lead to better science).
krapp 3y ago
And yet, when AI rewrites your paper for you, and you blindly send it to be reviewed, likely also by an AI, it may well have fabricated or misrepresented the actual research and congratulations you've published some bullshit. And no, humans are not just as bad as AI at this. I don't know why that meme persists - if humans were just as bad, much less worse, at hallucination and confabulation as AI at scale we would never have gotten past the stone age as a species. It would be useful to keep humans in the loop but the inevitable exponential explosion of AI generated research will simply be too much for peer review to handle (see the same thing happening with fiction writing, and several publications having to shut down because they were drowning in AI garbage.) But it's not as if it matters. As with everything else that incorporates AI, quality isn't relevant, only quantity and profitability.
- Charon77 3y ago
  That's true. If you don't use AI, others will. If that makes them profit, why would anyone not use it. The whole system favors publication quantity over quality, results over process. The solution is to ask our AI overlord.
  - soco 3y ago
    Or at some point change the rewarding system to favor quality. Voila! But why is everybody assuming that the AI-enhanced work will not be checked before submission? I'm no scientist but my workflow starts with my draft and ends with me correcting/adapting whatever AI changes did, whenever AI gets involved.
    - RecycledEle 3y ago
      >change the rewarding system to favor quality I think that will happen when we swap peer review for peer replication.
      - godelski 3y ago
        Exactly. We have to have mechanisms to support replication, which is the only means of validating work. Rather, adding evidence to the work's claim. We're too caught up in this naive notion of novelty, which today more strongly correlates with how well read one is in this massive ocean of papers.

jrimbault 3y ago

Fascinating how we (society) have let KPIs get into research/education and healthcare.

oefrha 3y ago
Research inherently requires attention and attention is inherently scarce, so unfortunately people do and will compete for attention however they can, metrics or not.
JumpCrisscross 3y ago
> let KPIs get into research/education and healthcare Research, sure, that’s a creative profession. But education and healthcare have obviously measurable outcomes, some of which are predictably desired ex ante.
- jrimbault 3y ago
  The implicit here is "business/for profit" KPIs.
godelski 3y ago
This is why I've started to argue against "peer review." Because no one can decide a paper's correctness/legitimacy by sitting down and reading the work. The method just doesn't scale and certainly doesn't in settings that are zero sum like conferences (see the absolute shitshow that is ML peer review). It's become a entire waste of time and money. The alternative I suggest is just submitting works to Open Review so there can be open discussions on the works. It removes the hostility from the setting and self biases towards reviewers/commenters being parties that are experts in that sub-niche as they're going to tend to be the only ones reading those papers, and especially reading closely. Metrics are fucking hard and we don't improve systems by removing nuance from metrics. Yet as complexity has increased in our world, this has seemed to be the direction we've gone. It's bad for science and the current methods have far too many false negatives (improper rejects) and false positives (improper accepts) to validate it as a meaningful signal. We've tried so many ways to fix it while maintaining the institution that it's time to just try letting go of it. I honestly cannot find a great argument for keeping these journals around (yes, there are arguments, but not many ,,strong,, arguments, and specifically ones that lead to better science).

krapp 3y ago

And yet, when AI rewrites your paper for you, and you blindly send it to be reviewed, likely also by an AI, it may well have fabricated or misrepresented the actual research and congratulations you've published some bullshit. And no, humans are not just as bad as AI at this. I don't know why that meme persists - if humans were just as bad, much less worse, at hallucination and confabulation as AI at scale we would never have gotten past the stone age as a species. It would be useful to keep humans in the loop but the inevitable exponential explosion of AI generated research will simply be too much for peer review to handle (see the same thing happening with fiction writing, and several publications having to shut down because they were drowning in AI garbage.) But it's not as if it matters. As with everything else that incorporates AI, quality isn't relevant, only quantity and profitability.

Charon77 3y ago
That's true. If you don't use AI, others will. If that makes them profit, why would anyone not use it. The whole system favors publication quantity over quality, results over process. The solution is to ask our AI overlord.
- soco 3y ago
  Or at some point change the rewarding system to favor quality. Voila! But why is everybody assuming that the AI-enhanced work will not be checked before submission? I'm no scientist but my workflow starts with my draft and ends with me correcting/adapting whatever AI changes did, whenever AI gets involved.
  - RecycledEle 3y ago
    >change the rewarding system to favor quality I think that will happen when we swap peer review for peer replication.
    - godelski 3y ago
      Exactly. We have to have mechanisms to support replication, which is the only means of validating work. Rather, adding evidence to the work's claim. We're too caught up in this naive notion of novelty, which today more strongly correlates with how well read one is in this massive ocean of papers.