Reviewing is also becoming an utter mess in hyped areas such as AI. It's unpaid, thankless work, where most of what you must evaluate is increasingly some gamed

Reviewing is also becoming an utter mess in hyped areas such as AI. It's unpaid, thankless work, where most of what you must evaluate is increasingly some gamed, partially AI-generated paper with strategically hidden aspects, rampant cherry picking, etc. Conference sizes are exploding. AAAI went from 15k submissions last year to 30k submissions, with 75k unique authors. There are close to 30k reviewers. It's becoming an assembly line factory with people not knowing each other any more (even in an anonymous review process, if you value the community, you behave differently). It's similar to what old professors lament when referring back to university 50 years ago. When groups were so small, profs knew individually the students. Then came the sausage factory model with 10x the students, students becoming just an ID number, reduction of oral exams in favor or written, gaming the rules more, increased cheating etc. The academic conference situation will implode under its own weight. As more and more people enter, the quality of reviews suffers, there is less and less illusions about any form of duty, responsibility, honor etc. and it's all a game of turf wars, citations rings, just slipping through the cracks by submitting enormous numbers of papers and resubmitting in a few months those that get rejected, without even fixing the typos that the first reviewers pointed out. And observing this just makes the few who did care also become jaded and put in less energy. Just as you have people in college who want to put in the absolute minimum work in order to get the piece of paper, you have the same happening in academia. Pump out the most papers with the least works, and the reviewers are just an obstacle in that view.