7 ms·

Looks like it is happening

184 points by jjgreen 8mo ago

sealeck 8mo ago
There are many really excellent papers out there - the kind which will save you hours/months of work (or even make things that were previously inviable to build viable). That said, it is amazing how terrible a lot of papers are; people are pressured to publish and therefore seem to get into weird ruts trying to do what they think will be published, rather than what is intellectually interesting...
- CoastalCoder 8mo ago
  Thanks for respecting HN's KJV-only rule! /jk
wmf 8mo ago
I assume hep = high energy physics in this context. PI = professor who received a government grant. Peer review has never really been blind and I suspect PIs will reject papers from "outsiders" even if they are higher quality. This already happens to some extent today when the stakes are lower.
- selridge 8mo ago
  Kinda. PI is principal investigator and usually they’re a professor with a grant (the grant being the thing they are the principal of investigating). That part is right. But they’re not really directly in the review loop. For some fields where things are small enough that folks can recognize style such as it exists, you could see reviewers passing over unfamiliar work and promoting familiar work. That was not the issue. The issue was that it still was kind of hard to produce crappy mid rate papers, so you kind of needed the infrastructure of a small lab to do that. Now you don’t. The success rate for those mediocre papers produced by grad students and postdocs will go way down. It is possible that will cease to be a useful signal for those early career researchers.
- moregrist 8mo ago
  Peer review isn’t the issue here. His comments are about Arxiv, which is a preprint server. Essentially anyone can publish a preprint. There’s no peer or other review involved.
  - xamuel 8mo ago
    This is a common misconception. People without academic affiliation (based on their email address) require someone to vouch for them before they can submit to arxiv. And papers submitted to arxiv (with or without affiliation) are reviewed, and many are rejected.
    - bmacho 8mo ago
      Papers on arxiv are only reviewed for formal requirements. They don't review every pdf there, and reject them for being false or wrong. You are right that arxiv is an invite-only website, but once you are in, there is no peer review of any form.
      - deleted 8mo ago
        [deleted]
    - Aurornis 8mo ago
      arXiv does not review everything pushed to the site. It's very easy to get in. It's becoming a common target for grifters who will "publish" papers on arXiv because it looks formal to those who don't know any better.
      - deleted 8mo ago
        [deleted]
- MarkusQ 8mo ago
  But peer review (circa 1965-2010[1]) is just the prior iteration of the problem[2]; the wave of crap[3] produced by publish or perish (crica 1950-present[4]). Rejecting papers by outsiders is irrelevant; the problem is we want to determine which papers are good/interesting/worth considering out of the fire hose of bilge, and, though we were already arguably failing at this, the problem just got harder. (I say arguably, because there is always the old "try it yourself and see if it actually works" trick, but nobody seems to be fond of this; it smacks of "do your own research" and we're lazy monkeys at heart, who would much rather copy off of someone else's homework.) [1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=peer+review&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=peer+review&ye... [2] https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-... [3] https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo... [4] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=publish+or+perish&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=publish+or+per...
- xamuel 8mo ago
  >Peer review has never really been blind and I suspect PIs will reject papers from "outsiders" even if they are higher quality. I'm a complete outsider (not even in academia at all) and just got a paper accepted in the top math biology journal [1]. But granted, it took literally years to write it up and get it through. I do really worry that without academic affiliation it is going to get harder and harder for outsiders as gates are necessarily kept more and more securely because of all the slop. [1] "Specieslike clusters based on identical ancestor points" https://philpapers.org/archive/ALESCB.pdf https://philpapers.org/archive/ALESCB.pdf
  - mmooss 8mo ago
    Congratulations. How did you do it? And how do you get access to resources such as reference products, journals, etc. that typically require institutions with budgets?
    - xamuel 8mo ago
      Sorry for not seeing your message until now. Journals, at least in mathematics, generally don't require you to have a university affiliation, so as long as the paper is good on its merits, you can get it in, though I don't know to what extent it might be more of an uphill battle due to implicit peer reviewer bias etc. Re: reference products: one generally scraps what one can together through a combination of arxiv.org, Anna's archive, or emailing the authors.
      - mmooss 8mo ago
        Thanks for responding! Have you ever tried to get access to for-pay reference sources such as JSTOR? I haven't found a way other than going in-person to libraries, which is not practical.
        xamuel 8mo ago
        On rare occasions where the other methods don't yield anything, I have friends in academia who have access and who are happy to help out. But yeah, it's totally medieval that this knowledge isn't freely available to the world.
sixtyj 8mo ago
Well… it is happening. You can’t put spilled milk back to bottle. You can do future requirements that will try to stop this behaviour. E.g. in the submission form could be a mandatory field “I hereby confirm that I wrote the paper personally.” In conditions there will be a note that violating this rule can lead to temporary or permanent ban of authors. In the world where research success is measured by points in WOS, this could lead to slow down the rise of LLM-generated papers.
- tossandthrow 8mo ago
  This approach dismisses the cases where Ai submissions generally are better. I don't think this is appreciated enough: a lot of Ai adaptation is not happening because of cost on the expense of quality. Quite the opposite. I am in the process of switching my company's use of retool for an Ai generated backoffice. First and foremost for usability, velocity and security. Secondly, we also save a buck.
  - moregrist 8mo ago
    > This approach dismisses the cases where Ai submissions generally are better. You’re perhaps missing the not so subtle subtext of Peter Woit’s post, and entire blog, which is: While AI is getting better, it’s still not _good_ by the standards of most science. However it’s as good as hep-th where (according to Peter Woit) the bar is incredibly low. His thesis is part “the whole field is bad” and part “Arxiv for this subfield is full of human slop.” I don’t have the background to engage with whether Peter Woit’s argument has merit, but it’s been consistent for 25+ years.
    - tossandthrow 8mo ago
      My comment was more an answer to the proposed gatekeeping of science as a human activity. Yes, Ai is still not good in the grand scheme of things. But everybody actively using it has gotten concerned over the past 2 months by the leap frigging of LLMs - and surprised as they thought we had arrived at the plateau. We will see in a year or two if humans still hold an advantage in research - currently very few do in software development, despite what they think about themselves.
mclau153 8mo ago
What is happening?
- wmf 8mo ago
  Human science being replaced by AI I guess.
  - Sharlin 8mo ago
    No, human mediocrity being replaced by AI. Mediocrity meaning papers that exist only to increment the magic "num_citations" variable.
- bryanrasmussen 8mo ago
  It is happening that people can now find out what articles are about by clicking the links to said articles and reading them! It's an amazing world, man. The future!
  - guerrilla 8mo ago
    Nope, the site is down.
    - bryanrasmussen 8mo ago
      OK, when I posted it wasn't and it isn't now. but a quote from the opening: "For a while now I’ve been speculating about what would happen when AI agents started being able to write papers indistinguishable in quality from those that have been typical of the sad state of hep-th for quite a while. Sabine Hossenfelder today has AI Is Bringing “The End of Theory”, in which she gives her cynical take that the past system of grant-holding PIs using grad students/postdocs to produce lots of mediocre papers with the PI’s name on them is about to change dramatically. "
- Sharlin 8mo ago
  The end of mediocrity, optimistically speaking. Getting so flooded in mediocrity that the gems are lost in the noise, pessimistically speaking.
selridge 8mo ago
Honestly, this is good. We were already in a completely unsustainable system. Nobody had an alternative. We still don’t have one but at least now it’s not just merely unsustainable— it is completely fucked in half. This kind of pattern is gonna get repeated in a lot of sectors when previous practices that were merely unsustainable become unsustained.
- commandlinefan 8mo ago
  Honestly, publication has been pretty meaningless for a long time, long before AI could generate complete paragraphs. "Publish or perish" meant that a lot of human-generated slop was being published by people who were put in a position of perverse incentives by a "well-meaning" (?) system. There will still be meaningful contributions, but they'll be as rare as they ever were.
- Certhas 8mo ago
  This has been my optimistic take on the situation for the last two years. My pessimistic take is that social systems have an incredible ability to persist in a state of utter fuckedness much longer than seems reasonably possible.
  - selridge 8mo ago
    Yeah and like…who knows if what is coming is better. Maybe big labs cartelize and withdraw from the global publication market (which is already unraveling). Maybe we ban theory and demand all papers be empirical, though that will amount to the same thing: seizure of publication by big actors. As you point out, human systems are machines for making do. There is no guarantee that dramatic pressures produce dramatic change. But I think we’ll see something weird, soon.
  - pjc50 8mo ago
    Well, yes. "Accelerationists" of all philosophies think that heightening the contradictions and breaking the current system will bring about its replacement with a better one. But a new system requires work, while chaos doesn't. It's quite possible to just destroy the current system leaving us without the wherewithal to build a replacement any time soon.
zoogeny 8mo ago
One thing I have been guilty of, even though I am an AI maximalist, is asking the question: "If AI is so good, why don't we see X". Where X might be (in the context of vibe coding) the next redis, nginx, sqlite, or even linux. But I really have to remember, we are at the leading edge here. Things take time. There is an opening (generation) and a closing (discernment). Perhaps AI will first generate a huge amount of noise and then whittle it down to the useful signal. If that view is correct, then this is solid evidence of the amplification of possibility. People will decry the increase of noise, perhaps feeling swamped by it. But the next phase will be separating the wheat from the chaff. It is only in that second phase that we will really know the potential impact.
- jellyroll42 8mo ago
  By its nature, it can only produce _another_ Redis, not _the next_ Redis.
  - dingnuts 8mo ago
    [dead]
  - smokel 8mo ago
    This is probably an outdated understanding of how LLMs work. Modern LLMs can reason and they are creative, at least if you don't mind stretching the meaning of those words a bit. The thing they currently lack is the social skills, ambition, and accountability to share a piece of software and get adoption for it.
    - oytis 8mo ago
      How is it outdated? Principles of operation of LLMs didn't change because they now talk to themselves before talking to the prompter.
      - smokel 8mo ago
        I suggested that the _understanding_ is outdated, not the principles. Many people used to say that LLMs were no more than a stochastic parrot, implying that they would be incapable of forming novel ideas. It is quite obvious that that is no longer the case.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
sidrag22 8mo ago
Noise is going to be the coming years biggest issue for so many fields. A losing battle like arguing with a conspiracy minded relative, you can slowly and clearly address one conspiracy and disprove it, by the time you do, they are deep into 8 new ones.
general_reveal 8mo ago
“And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” - Ecclesiastes 12:12 (KJV) I suppose we’re entering TURBO mode for of ‘making many books there is no end’.
dang 8mo ago
> submission numbers in the last couple months have nearly doubled with respect to the stable numbers of previous years This is showing up (no pun intended) on HN as well. The # of submissions and # of submitters, which traditionally had been surprisingly stable—fluctuating within a fixed range for well over 10 years—has recently been reaching all-time highs. Not double, though...yet.
- hedgehog 8mo ago
  Robots coming for todsacerdoti's job.
- minimaxir 8mo ago
  Are the increasing # of distinct submitters from established accounts or new accounts?
  - dang 8mo ago
    Don't know that yet either! at least that one isn't hard to answer, it just needs a bit of spare time.
    - rzk 8mo ago
      Here is the data since the beginning of HN, where a new submitter is defined as a user whose account was created less than three months before the submission: Stories: https://pastebin.com/Zc4jXvp4 https://pastebin.com/Zc4jXvp4 Comments: https://pastebin.com/cFuczTWJ https://pastebin.com/cFuczTWJ The number of new submitters has indeed increased significantly since the beginning of 2026.
  - vunderba 8mo ago
    Another very common tactic I’ve seen is accounts with 1 karma that’ve been aged a few months.
- vermilingua 8mo ago
  Is it feasible to differentiate increased agent-traffic from the organic growth in popularity HN has been seeing?
hmokiguess 8mo ago
I think this is solid proof that the bedrock of academia is deeply motivated by money and still defaults to optimizing where it impacts its bottom line. If professors can get more grants and more publications in less time with less spending, of course they are going to be doing that. This isn't just because of AI, but also because of how this system is designed in the first place.
- mathisfun123 8mo ago
  > I think this is solid proof that the bedrock of academia is deeply motivated by money and still defaults to optimizing where it impacts its bottom line. no shit - could've asked literally anyone that's finished their phd to save yourself the conjecturing/hypothesizing about this fact.
- Certhas 8mo ago
  This is stupid. Nobody motivated by money is in academia. Academics are motivated by curiosity, but also prestige, vanity and the wish to hire students and collaborators. And on top of human vanity working it's magic, the ideology that everything should be a market and competition is the final form of social organisation, has pervaded academia just as much as everything else. I agree that the system of publishing papers to gain prestige to gain resources to publish papers was already broken pre AI.
  - jasperry 8mo ago
    You're right that being a scientist is unlikely to result in personal wealth and so that's not the primary drive for those who seek faculty or research positions. However, it's not just curiosity, prestige and vanity either, because a big factor for promotion and tenure is how much grant money you bring in. That money is what keeps the university's lights on and buys the lab equipment and pays the grad students, so it's still money as a primary driver in the background.
    - tombert 8mo ago
      My dad said he stopped being a professor because of that. He liked the research, and he even liked teaching, but he absolutely hated having to constantly try and find grant money. He said he ended up seeing everyone as "potential funders" and less like "people" because his job kind of depended on it, and it ended up burning him out. He lasted four years and went into engineering. I don't know that "motivation" is the right word for it, because I don't think professors like having to find grant money all the time. I think most people who get PhDs and try to go to academia do it for a genuine love for the subject, and they find the grant-searching to be a necessary evil part of the job; it's more "survival" than regular motivation, though I am admittedly splitting hairs here.
guerrilla 8mo ago
Website's down. What was it about?
pavel_lishin 8mo ago
Apparently "hep-th" stands for "High Energy Physics - Theory".
ModernMech 8mo ago
I mean... I dunno I wish the AI could write my papers. I ask it to and it's just bad. The research models return research that doesn't look anything like the research I do on my own -- half of it is wrong, the rest is shallow, and it's hardly comprehensive despite having access to everything (it will fail to find things unless you specifically prompt for them, and even then if the signal is too low it'll be wrong about it). So I can't even trust it to do something as simple as a literature review. Insofar as most research is awful, it's true that the AI is producing research that looks and sounds like most of it out there today. But common-case research is not what propels society forward. If we try to automate research with the mediocrity machine, we'll just get mediocre research.
hxbdg 8mo ago
[dead]
8organicbits 8mo ago
> when AI agents started being able to write papers indistinguishable in quality from [...] Given that arXiv lacks peer review, I'm not clear what quality bar is being referenced here.
Chinjut 8mo ago
Note the following comment by Jerry Ling: "The effect goes away if you search properly using the original submission date instead of the most recent submission date. By using most recent submission date, your analysis is biased because we’re so close to the beginning of 2026 so ofc we will see a peak that’s just people who have recently modified their submission."
- myhf 8mo ago
  The last-modified-date effect is even more important, because it can be used to support whatever the latest fad is, without needing to adapt data or arguments to the specifics of that fad.
- Aurornis 8mo ago
  The post has been edited with an update at the top now.
bitbytebane 8mo ago
[dead]
- hmokiguess 8mo ago
  [dead]
tombert 8mo ago
I like AI, I use Codex and ChatGPT like most people are, but I have to say that I am pretty tired of low-effort crap taking over everything, particularly YouTube. There have always been content mills, but there was still some cost with producing the low-effort "Top 10" or "Iceberg Examination" videos. Now I will turn on a video about any topic, watch it for three minutes, immediately get a kind of uncanny vibe, and then the AI voice will make a pronunciation mistake (e.g. confusing wind, like the weather effect or the winding of a spring), or the script starts getting redundant or repetitive in ways that are common with AI. And I suspect these kinds of videos will become more common as time goes on. The cost to producing these videos is getting close to "free" meaning that it doesn't take much to make a profit on them, even if their views are relatively low per-video. If AI has taught me anything, it's that there still is no substitute for effort. I'm sure AI is used in plenty of places where I don't notice it, because the people who used it still put in effort to make a good product. There are people who don't just make a prompt like "make me a fifteen minute video about Chris Chan" and "generate me a thumbnail with Chris Chan with the caption 'he's gone too far'", and instead will use AI as a tool to make something neat. Genuine effort is hard, and rare, and these AI videos can give the facsimile of something that prior to 2023 was high effort. I hate it.
- karel-3d 8mo ago
  I think the snake will eat its tail because it will be harder and harder to train on the new data, as they are already AI generated, and the model will collapse. You already cannot train on YouTube data, for example, because it's now overwhelmed by AI slop. We are not there yet though and we are still getting better at mining the pre-AI data.
mianos 8mo ago
This title should have been editorialised. It's like a headline from the daily mirror.
hhsuey 8mo ago
What's happening? I hate click bait titles like these.
- card_zero 8mo ago
  People used to spam out masses of low-quality scientific papers in a scattergun approach to gain fame and citations, and they still do, but now they do it more, because LLMs churn it out faster than students.
- VerifiedReports 8mo ago
  But HN loves them. How dare you call one out!
lloydatkinson 8mo ago
Isn't there a rule about vague titles like this?
- VerifiedReports 8mo ago
  They ARE the rule on HN. If you criticize bullshit titles like this, you'll be downvoted and shadow-banned. Ask me how I know.
  - lloydatkinson 8mo ago
    Oh I know I’ve experienced it too
NooneAtAll3 8mo ago
Clickbait title what would be a better one?
- VerifiedReports 8mo ago
  Anything containing a single descriptive term. But don't you dare criticize a headline here.
MoonWalk 8mo ago
What is?
tempodox 8mo ago
Convenience dictates that we will be drowning in slop as long as convenience lets us rank academics by number of publications. Publish or perish?
AvAn12 8mo ago
The shilling for AI continues. How much $$$ do the big tech companies pay Columbia? Oh yeah, and what exactly did Columbia agree to do to get the trmp admin to leave them alone? All speculation of course, but the circumstantial picture stinks.
gtirloni 8mo ago
Who's spending money to write bots to comment on obscure (to me) websites and why?
- evolighting 8mo ago
  Bot comments are everywhere( no only obscure websites ). I suppose it's because someone just want to try them out and it is really affordable.
seg_lol 8mo ago
If someone mentions Sabine Hossenfelder and it isn't to expose her as a rage-bait intellectual dark web grifter, then it puts that person in a suspect light.
- oytis 8mo ago
  > rage-bait intellectual dark web grifter Citation needed
antognini 8mo ago
I think the long term impact of this will be to strengthen the importance of social ties in academic publishing. As it is there are so many papers published in many fields that people tend to filter for papers published by big names and major institutions. But the inevitable torrent of AI slop will overwhelm anyone who is looking for any gems coming from outsiders. I suspect the net effect will be to make it even more important that you join a big name institution in order to be taken seriously.
pllbnk 8mo ago
In most of the world the past decades there has been no thought behind who should get university education. It has been given that after high school you should aim for university. I have studied software engineering in the most prestigious university in my country and from 100+ students in my group there were only a few (myself excluded) who actually had some interest in academic work and desire to pursue it. Most of us were just coasting - passing exams and writing mediocre papers without any goal to have those papers ever being read by someone after the graduation. I think that university level and other kinds of formal education should be segregated. Universities should host fewer students and being able to provide them with higher rewards for actually meaningful work and I believe that a flood of mediocre quality papers (but let's admit it, in fact they are low quality in their content and perhaps good in their presentation) will lead us to rebuild the education system.
- vostrocity 8mo ago
  This will probably happen naturally as knowledge work declines.
  - leptons 8mo ago
    I'm not convinced that will really happen. "AI" just doesn't give reliable output, and even if humans don't either, they are still far less prone to error. And errors matter, a lot.
- ktimespi 8mo ago
  This comes across as elitist
  - ido 8mo ago
    It can come across as elitist and be true at the same time.
    - ktimespi 8mo ago
      I don't think it is true either, considering the broad claims made. The thing to be changed is research incentives, not getting the bar even higher. Take the Francesca Gino case, for example. I don't think anyone can argue that Harvard's bar is "not high enough".
tummler 8mo ago
Can people please not post links with vague titles like this? I had to click through and read half the article to even figure out what this was about, and I wasn’t interested.
- Propelloni 8mo ago
  Me too. So as a service to the community: the article is about a noticeable increase of submissions about high-energy theory to arXiv due to mediocre articles quickly produced with or by AI and how to deal with that.
  - egeozcan 8mo ago
    These days, it feels like, every article about something big happening is about an AI doomsday scenario, AI bubble "finally" bursting or AGI being reached. Maybe one exception is milestones in nuclear fusion, but even that is very much rare compared to these.
- croes 8mo ago
  But what else to do if you think the article is interesting but the rules say don’t change the title?
  - Miraltar 8mo ago
    Guidelines say "please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" in that case I'd argue that it's linkbait so changing it is justified
    - OJFord 8mo ago
      > Looks like it is happening - AI bringing the end of theory publications To keep the original, with added clarity from the opening paragraph. Could use an emdash for irony.
  - Propelloni 8mo ago
    Write a short blurb what's it about? You can do that with any submission.
tim333 8mo ago
Tl;dr "It's happening" seems to be AI and similar writing papers and coming up with theories as in this recent Sabine youtube https://youtu.be/JvgaZ_myFE4?t=72 https://youtu.be/JvgaZ_myFE4?t=72
altern8 8mo ago
"THIS happened to submissions about high-energy theory to arXiv, and it will leave you speechless!"
snickerer 8mo ago
In a normal and sane world, a scientist is a nerd about their field. They are highly interested in new thoughts and insights. When a new paper in their field is published, they try hard to find the time to read it. The reason is: every paper is written by enthusiasts who want to add something of value, new insights, to the discussion. Proving or disproving theories, adding puzzle pieces to the general picture. That is the normal situation, which is the foundation of the progression of civilisation. But some people install incentive systems to sabotage this. They are sabotaging civilisation itself.
snickerer 8mo ago
Reform idea: We should decouple the publishing of papers from academic careers completely. Papers can't generate any reputation or money for the authors anymore. To achieve that, we must anonymize the authors. All scientists get some (paid) time to write papers — if they want. What they write and if they publish it is not known to anybody. They are trusted to write something of value in that time. Universities can come up with other ways of judging which professors they hire. Interviews. Test teachings. Or the writing of an non-public application essay, which describes their past research and discoveries.
- mmooss 8mo ago
  The value, to society, to your field and to you institution, of being a scholar is to create new knowledge. New knowledge has no value unless you disseminate it, or publish. Another necessity is the public (usually within its field) examination of the knowledge, including discussion/debate. Knowledge is merely embryonic without those things - undeveloped, not at all reliable. That is difficult without the author able to respond. And others want to expand and build on the work, which often benefits greatly from contacting the author. In the modern (post-positivist?) approach to science, the world respects that it's written by a human who has a perspective and, despite their best intentions, biases. You can't evaluate any knowledge without knowing its source, in science or elsewhere. The first element of a citation is the author, not the title or journal (though I don't know why that happened historically). And the latter is a reason any LLM author should be identified.
kwar13 8mo ago
Took way to too long to even understand what the numbers were, or what the title is referring to...

184 points by jjgreen 8mo ago

There are many really excellent papers out there - the kind which will save you hours/months of work (or even make things that were previously inviable to build viable). That said, it is amazing how terrible a lot of papers are; people are pressured to publish and therefore seem to get into weird ruts trying to do what they think will be published, rather than what is intellectually interesting...

CoastalCoder 8mo ago
Thanks for respecting HN's KJV-only rule! /jk

wmf 8mo ago

I assume hep = high energy physics in this context. PI = professor who received a government grant. Peer review has never really been blind and I suspect PIs will reject papers from "outsiders" even if they are higher quality. This already happens to some extent today when the stakes are lower.

selridge 8mo ago
Kinda. PI is principal investigator and usually they’re a professor with a grant (the grant being the thing they are the principal of investigating). That part is right. But they’re not really directly in the review loop. For some fields where things are small enough that folks can recognize style such as it exists, you could see reviewers passing over unfamiliar work and promoting familiar work. That was not the issue. The issue was that it still was kind of hard to produce crappy mid rate papers, so you kind of needed the infrastructure of a small lab to do that. Now you don’t. The success rate for those mediocre papers produced by grad students and postdocs will go way down. It is possible that will cease to be a useful signal for those early career researchers.
moregrist 8mo ago
Peer review isn’t the issue here. His comments are about Arxiv, which is a preprint server. Essentially anyone can publish a preprint. There’s no peer or other review involved.
- xamuel 8mo ago
  This is a common misconception. People without academic affiliation (based on their email address) require someone to vouch for them before they can submit to arxiv. And papers submitted to arxiv (with or without affiliation) are reviewed, and many are rejected.
  - bmacho 8mo ago
    Papers on arxiv are only reviewed for formal requirements. They don't review every pdf there, and reject them for being false or wrong. You are right that arxiv is an invite-only website, but once you are in, there is no peer review of any form.
    - deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
  - Aurornis 8mo ago
    arXiv does not review everything pushed to the site. It's very easy to get in. It's becoming a common target for grifters who will "publish" papers on arXiv because it looks formal to those who don't know any better.
    - deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
MarkusQ 8mo ago
But peer review (circa 1965-2010[1]) is just the prior iteration of the problem[2]; the wave of crap[3] produced by publish or perish (crica 1950-present[4]). Rejecting papers by outsiders is irrelevant; the problem is we want to determine which papers are good/interesting/worth considering out of the fire hose of bilge, and, though we were already arguably failing at this, the problem just got harder. (I say arguably, because there is always the old "try it yourself and see if it actually works" trick, but nobody seems to be fond of this; it smacks of "do your own research" and we're lazy monkeys at heart, who would much rather copy off of someone else's homework.) [1] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=peer+review&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=peer+review&ye... [2] https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-peer-review https://www.experimental-history.com/p/the-rise-and-fall-of-... [3] https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/journal.pmed.0020124 https://journals.plos.org/plosmedicine/article?id=10.1371/jo... [4] https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=publish+or+perish&year_start=1800&year_end=2022&corpus=en&smoothing=3 https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=publish+or+per...
xamuel 8mo ago
>Peer review has never really been blind and I suspect PIs will reject papers from "outsiders" even if they are higher quality. I'm a complete outsider (not even in academia at all) and just got a paper accepted in the top math biology journal [1]. But granted, it took literally years to write it up and get it through. I do really worry that without academic affiliation it is going to get harder and harder for outsiders as gates are necessarily kept more and more securely because of all the slop. [1] "Specieslike clusters based on identical ancestor points" https://philpapers.org/archive/ALESCB.pdf https://philpapers.org/archive/ALESCB.pdf
- mmooss 8mo ago
  Congratulations. How did you do it? And how do you get access to resources such as reference products, journals, etc. that typically require institutions with budgets?
  - xamuel 8mo ago
    Sorry for not seeing your message until now. Journals, at least in mathematics, generally don't require you to have a university affiliation, so as long as the paper is good on its merits, you can get it in, though I don't know to what extent it might be more of an uphill battle due to implicit peer reviewer bias etc. Re: reference products: one generally scraps what one can together through a combination of arxiv.org, Anna's archive, or emailing the authors.
    - mmooss 8mo ago
      Thanks for responding! Have you ever tried to get access to for-pay reference sources such as JSTOR? I haven't found a way other than going in-person to libraries, which is not practical.
      - xamuel 8mo ago
        On rare occasions where the other methods don't yield anything, I have friends in academia who have access and who are happy to help out. But yeah, it's totally medieval that this knowledge isn't freely available to the world.

sixtyj 8mo ago

Well… it is happening. You can’t put spilled milk back to bottle. You can do future requirements that will try to stop this behaviour. E.g. in the submission form could be a mandatory field “I hereby confirm that I wrote the paper personally.” In conditions there will be a note that violating this rule can lead to temporary or permanent ban of authors. In the world where research success is measured by points in WOS, this could lead to slow down the rise of LLM-generated papers.

tossandthrow 8mo ago
This approach dismisses the cases where Ai submissions generally are better. I don't think this is appreciated enough: a lot of Ai adaptation is not happening because of cost on the expense of quality. Quite the opposite. I am in the process of switching my company's use of retool for an Ai generated backoffice. First and foremost for usability, velocity and security. Secondly, we also save a buck.
- moregrist 8mo ago
  > This approach dismisses the cases where Ai submissions generally are better. You’re perhaps missing the not so subtle subtext of Peter Woit’s post, and entire blog, which is: While AI is getting better, it’s still not _good_ by the standards of most science. However it’s as good as hep-th where (according to Peter Woit) the bar is incredibly low. His thesis is part “the whole field is bad” and part “Arxiv for this subfield is full of human slop.” I don’t have the background to engage with whether Peter Woit’s argument has merit, but it’s been consistent for 25+ years.
  - tossandthrow 8mo ago
    My comment was more an answer to the proposed gatekeeping of science as a human activity. Yes, Ai is still not good in the grand scheme of things. But everybody actively using it has gotten concerned over the past 2 months by the leap frigging of LLMs - and surprised as they thought we had arrived at the plateau. We will see in a year or two if humans still hold an advantage in research - currently very few do in software development, despite what they think about themselves.

mclau153 8mo ago

What is happening?

wmf 8mo ago
Human science being replaced by AI I guess.
- Sharlin 8mo ago
  No, human mediocrity being replaced by AI. Mediocrity meaning papers that exist only to increment the magic "num_citations" variable.
bryanrasmussen 8mo ago
It is happening that people can now find out what articles are about by clicking the links to said articles and reading them! It's an amazing world, man. The future!
- guerrilla 8mo ago
  Nope, the site is down.
  - bryanrasmussen 8mo ago
    OK, when I posted it wasn't and it isn't now. but a quote from the opening: "For a while now I’ve been speculating about what would happen when AI agents started being able to write papers indistinguishable in quality from those that have been typical of the sad state of hep-th for quite a while. Sabine Hossenfelder today has AI Is Bringing “The End of Theory”, in which she gives her cynical take that the past system of grant-holding PIs using grad students/postdocs to produce lots of mediocre papers with the PI’s name on them is about to change dramatically. "
Sharlin 8mo ago
The end of mediocrity, optimistically speaking. Getting so flooded in mediocrity that the gems are lost in the noise, pessimistically speaking.

selridge 8mo ago

Honestly, this is good. We were already in a completely unsustainable system. Nobody had an alternative. We still don’t have one but at least now it’s not just merely unsustainable— it is completely fucked in half. This kind of pattern is gonna get repeated in a lot of sectors when previous practices that were merely unsustainable become unsustained.

commandlinefan 8mo ago
Honestly, publication has been pretty meaningless for a long time, long before AI could generate complete paragraphs. "Publish or perish" meant that a lot of human-generated slop was being published by people who were put in a position of perverse incentives by a "well-meaning" (?) system. There will still be meaningful contributions, but they'll be as rare as they ever were.
Certhas 8mo ago
This has been my optimistic take on the situation for the last two years. My pessimistic take is that social systems have an incredible ability to persist in a state of utter fuckedness much longer than seems reasonably possible.
- selridge 8mo ago
  Yeah and like…who knows if what is coming is better. Maybe big labs cartelize and withdraw from the global publication market (which is already unraveling). Maybe we ban theory and demand all papers be empirical, though that will amount to the same thing: seizure of publication by big actors. As you point out, human systems are machines for making do. There is no guarantee that dramatic pressures produce dramatic change. But I think we’ll see something weird, soon.
- pjc50 8mo ago
  Well, yes. "Accelerationists" of all philosophies think that heightening the contradictions and breaking the current system will bring about its replacement with a better one. But a new system requires work, while chaos doesn't. It's quite possible to just destroy the current system leaving us without the wherewithal to build a replacement any time soon.

zoogeny 8mo ago

One thing I have been guilty of, even though I am an AI maximalist, is asking the question: "If AI is so good, why don't we see X". Where X might be (in the context of vibe coding) the next redis, nginx, sqlite, or even linux. But I really have to remember, we are at the leading edge here. Things take time. There is an opening (generation) and a closing (discernment). Perhaps AI will first generate a huge amount of noise and then whittle it down to the useful signal. If that view is correct, then this is solid evidence of the amplification of possibility. People will decry the increase of noise, perhaps feeling swamped by it. But the next phase will be separating the wheat from the chaff. It is only in that second phase that we will really know the potential impact.

jellyroll42 8mo ago
By its nature, it can only produce _another_ Redis, not _the next_ Redis.
- dingnuts 8mo ago
  [dead]
- smokel 8mo ago
  This is probably an outdated understanding of how LLMs work. Modern LLMs can reason and they are creative, at least if you don't mind stretching the meaning of those words a bit. The thing they currently lack is the social skills, ambition, and accountability to share a piece of software and get adoption for it.
  - oytis 8mo ago
    How is it outdated? Principles of operation of LLMs didn't change because they now talk to themselves before talking to the prompter.
    - smokel 8mo ago
      I suggested that the _understanding_ is outdated, not the principles. Many people used to say that LLMs were no more than a stochastic parrot, implying that they would be incapable of forming novel ideas. It is quite obvious that that is no longer the case.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

sidrag22 8mo ago

Noise is going to be the coming years biggest issue for so many fields. A losing battle like arguing with a conspiracy minded relative, you can slowly and clearly address one conspiracy and disprove it, by the time you do, they are deep into 8 new ones.

general_reveal 8mo ago

“And further, by these, my son, be admonished: of making many books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” - Ecclesiastes 12:12 (KJV) I suppose we’re entering TURBO mode for of ‘making many books there is no end’.

dang 8mo ago

> submission numbers in the last couple months have nearly doubled with respect to the stable numbers of previous years This is showing up (no pun intended) on HN as well. The # of submissions and # of submitters, which traditionally had been surprisingly stable—fluctuating within a fixed range for well over 10 years—has recently been reaching all-time highs. Not double, though...yet.

hedgehog 8mo ago
Robots coming for todsacerdoti's job.
minimaxir 8mo ago
Are the increasing # of distinct submitters from established accounts or new accounts?
- dang 8mo ago
  Don't know that yet either! at least that one isn't hard to answer, it just needs a bit of spare time.
  - rzk 8mo ago
    Here is the data since the beginning of HN, where a new submitter is defined as a user whose account was created less than three months before the submission: Stories: https://pastebin.com/Zc4jXvp4 https://pastebin.com/Zc4jXvp4 Comments: https://pastebin.com/cFuczTWJ https://pastebin.com/cFuczTWJ The number of new submitters has indeed increased significantly since the beginning of 2026.
- vunderba 8mo ago
  Another very common tactic I’ve seen is accounts with 1 karma that’ve been aged a few months.
vermilingua 8mo ago
Is it feasible to differentiate increased agent-traffic from the organic growth in popularity HN has been seeing?

hmokiguess 8mo ago

I think this is solid proof that the bedrock of academia is deeply motivated by money and still defaults to optimizing where it impacts its bottom line. If professors can get more grants and more publications in less time with less spending, of course they are going to be doing that. This isn't just because of AI, but also because of how this system is designed in the first place.

mathisfun123 8mo ago
> I think this is solid proof that the bedrock of academia is deeply motivated by money and still defaults to optimizing where it impacts its bottom line. no shit - could've asked literally anyone that's finished their phd to save yourself the conjecturing/hypothesizing about this fact.
Certhas 8mo ago
This is stupid. Nobody motivated by money is in academia. Academics are motivated by curiosity, but also prestige, vanity and the wish to hire students and collaborators. And on top of human vanity working it's magic, the ideology that everything should be a market and competition is the final form of social organisation, has pervaded academia just as much as everything else. I agree that the system of publishing papers to gain prestige to gain resources to publish papers was already broken pre AI.
- jasperry 8mo ago
  You're right that being a scientist is unlikely to result in personal wealth and so that's not the primary drive for those who seek faculty or research positions. However, it's not just curiosity, prestige and vanity either, because a big factor for promotion and tenure is how much grant money you bring in. That money is what keeps the university's lights on and buys the lab equipment and pays the grad students, so it's still money as a primary driver in the background.
  - tombert 8mo ago
    My dad said he stopped being a professor because of that. He liked the research, and he even liked teaching, but he absolutely hated having to constantly try and find grant money. He said he ended up seeing everyone as "potential funders" and less like "people" because his job kind of depended on it, and it ended up burning him out. He lasted four years and went into engineering. I don't know that "motivation" is the right word for it, because I don't think professors like having to find grant money all the time. I think most people who get PhDs and try to go to academia do it for a genuine love for the subject, and they find the grant-searching to be a necessary evil part of the job; it's more "survival" than regular motivation, though I am admittedly splitting hairs here.

guerrilla 8mo ago

Website's down. What was it about?

pavel_lishin 8mo ago

Apparently "hep-th" stands for "High Energy Physics - Theory".

ModernMech 8mo ago

I mean... I dunno I wish the AI could write my papers. I ask it to and it's just bad. The research models return research that doesn't look anything like the research I do on my own -- half of it is wrong, the rest is shallow, and it's hardly comprehensive despite having access to everything (it will fail to find things unless you specifically prompt for them, and even then if the signal is too low it'll be wrong about it). So I can't even trust it to do something as simple as a literature review. Insofar as most research is awful, it's true that the AI is producing research that looks and sounds like most of it out there today. But common-case research is not what propels society forward. If we try to automate research with the mediocrity machine, we'll just get mediocre research.

hxbdg 8mo ago

[dead]

8organicbits 8mo ago

> when AI agents started being able to write papers indistinguishable in quality from [...] Given that arXiv lacks peer review, I'm not clear what quality bar is being referenced here.

Chinjut 8mo ago

Note the following comment by Jerry Ling: "The effect goes away if you search properly using the original submission date instead of the most recent submission date. By using most recent submission date, your analysis is biased because we’re so close to the beginning of 2026 so ofc we will see a peak that’s just people who have recently modified their submission."

myhf 8mo ago
The last-modified-date effect is even more important, because it can be used to support whatever the latest fad is, without needing to adapt data or arguments to the specifics of that fad.
Aurornis 8mo ago
The post has been edited with an update at the top now.

bitbytebane 8mo ago

[dead]

hmokiguess 8mo ago
[dead]

tombert 8mo ago

I like AI, I use Codex and ChatGPT like most people are, but I have to say that I am pretty tired of low-effort crap taking over everything, particularly YouTube. There have always been content mills, but there was still some cost with producing the low-effort "Top 10" or "Iceberg Examination" videos. Now I will turn on a video about any topic, watch it for three minutes, immediately get a kind of uncanny vibe, and then the AI voice will make a pronunciation mistake (e.g. confusing wind, like the weather effect or the winding of a spring), or the script starts getting redundant or repetitive in ways that are common with AI. And I suspect these kinds of videos will become more common as time goes on. The cost to producing these videos is getting close to "free" meaning that it doesn't take much to make a profit on them, even if their views are relatively low per-video. If AI has taught me anything, it's that there still is no substitute for effort. I'm sure AI is used in plenty of places where I don't notice it, because the people who used it still put in effort to make a good product. There are people who don't just make a prompt like "make me a fifteen minute video about Chris Chan" and "generate me a thumbnail with Chris Chan with the caption 'he's gone too far'", and instead will use AI as a tool to make something neat. Genuine effort is hard, and rare, and these AI videos can give the facsimile of something that prior to 2023 was high effort. I hate it.

karel-3d 8mo ago
I think the snake will eat its tail because it will be harder and harder to train on the new data, as they are already AI generated, and the model will collapse. You already cannot train on YouTube data, for example, because it's now overwhelmed by AI slop. We are not there yet though and we are still getting better at mining the pre-AI data.

mianos 8mo ago

This title should have been editorialised. It's like a headline from the daily mirror.

hhsuey 8mo ago

What's happening? I hate click bait titles like these.

card_zero 8mo ago
People used to spam out masses of low-quality scientific papers in a scattergun approach to gain fame and citations, and they still do, but now they do it more, because LLMs churn it out faster than students.
VerifiedReports 8mo ago
But HN loves them. How dare you call one out!

lloydatkinson 8mo ago

Isn't there a rule about vague titles like this?

VerifiedReports 8mo ago
They ARE the rule on HN. If you criticize bullshit titles like this, you'll be downvoted and shadow-banned. Ask me how I know.
- lloydatkinson 8mo ago
  Oh I know I’ve experienced it too

NooneAtAll3 8mo ago

Clickbait title what would be a better one?

VerifiedReports 8mo ago
Anything containing a single descriptive term. But don't you dare criticize a headline here.

MoonWalk 8mo ago

What is?

tempodox 8mo ago

Convenience dictates that we will be drowning in slop as long as convenience lets us rank academics by number of publications. Publish or perish?

AvAn12 8mo ago

The shilling for AI continues. How much $$$ do the big tech companies pay Columbia? Oh yeah, and what exactly did Columbia agree to do to get the trmp admin to leave them alone? All speculation of course, but the circumstantial picture stinks.

gtirloni 8mo ago

Who's spending money to write bots to comment on obscure (to me) websites and why?

evolighting 8mo ago
Bot comments are everywhere( no only obscure websites ). I suppose it's because someone just want to try them out and it is really affordable.

seg_lol 8mo ago

If someone mentions Sabine Hossenfelder and it isn't to expose her as a rage-bait intellectual dark web grifter, then it puts that person in a suspect light.

oytis 8mo ago
> rage-bait intellectual dark web grifter Citation needed

antognini 8mo ago

I think the long term impact of this will be to strengthen the importance of social ties in academic publishing. As it is there are so many papers published in many fields that people tend to filter for papers published by big names and major institutions. But the inevitable torrent of AI slop will overwhelm anyone who is looking for any gems coming from outsiders. I suspect the net effect will be to make it even more important that you join a big name institution in order to be taken seriously.

pllbnk 8mo ago

In most of the world the past decades there has been no thought behind who should get university education. It has been given that after high school you should aim for university. I have studied software engineering in the most prestigious university in my country and from 100+ students in my group there were only a few (myself excluded) who actually had some interest in academic work and desire to pursue it. Most of us were just coasting - passing exams and writing mediocre papers without any goal to have those papers ever being read by someone after the graduation. I think that university level and other kinds of formal education should be segregated. Universities should host fewer students and being able to provide them with higher rewards for actually meaningful work and I believe that a flood of mediocre quality papers (but let's admit it, in fact they are low quality in their content and perhaps good in their presentation) will lead us to rebuild the education system.

vostrocity 8mo ago
This will probably happen naturally as knowledge work declines.
- leptons 8mo ago
  I'm not convinced that will really happen. "AI" just doesn't give reliable output, and even if humans don't either, they are still far less prone to error. And errors matter, a lot.
ktimespi 8mo ago
This comes across as elitist
- ido 8mo ago
  It can come across as elitist and be true at the same time.
  - ktimespi 8mo ago
    I don't think it is true either, considering the broad claims made. The thing to be changed is research incentives, not getting the bar even higher. Take the Francesca Gino case, for example. I don't think anyone can argue that Harvard's bar is "not high enough".

tummler 8mo ago

Can people please not post links with vague titles like this? I had to click through and read half the article to even figure out what this was about, and I wasn’t interested.

Propelloni 8mo ago
Me too. So as a service to the community: the article is about a noticeable increase of submissions about high-energy theory to arXiv due to mediocre articles quickly produced with or by AI and how to deal with that.
- egeozcan 8mo ago
  These days, it feels like, every article about something big happening is about an AI doomsday scenario, AI bubble "finally" bursting or AGI being reached. Maybe one exception is milestones in nuclear fusion, but even that is very much rare compared to these.
croes 8mo ago
But what else to do if you think the article is interesting but the rules say don’t change the title?
- Miraltar 8mo ago
  Guidelines say "please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait" in that case I'd argue that it's linkbait so changing it is justified
  - OJFord 8mo ago
    > Looks like it is happening - AI bringing the end of theory publications To keep the original, with added clarity from the opening paragraph. Could use an emdash for irony.
- Propelloni 8mo ago
  Write a short blurb what's it about? You can do that with any submission.

tim333 8mo ago

Tl;dr "It's happening" seems to be AI and similar writing papers and coming up with theories as in this recent Sabine youtube https://youtu.be/JvgaZ_myFE4?t=72 https://youtu.be/JvgaZ_myFE4?t=72

altern8 8mo ago

"THIS happened to submissions about high-energy theory to arXiv, and it will leave you speechless!"

snickerer 8mo ago

In a normal and sane world, a scientist is a nerd about their field. They are highly interested in new thoughts and insights. When a new paper in their field is published, they try hard to find the time to read it. The reason is: every paper is written by enthusiasts who want to add something of value, new insights, to the discussion. Proving or disproving theories, adding puzzle pieces to the general picture. That is the normal situation, which is the foundation of the progression of civilisation. But some people install incentive systems to sabotage this. They are sabotaging civilisation itself.

snickerer 8mo ago

Reform idea: We should decouple the publishing of papers from academic careers completely. Papers can't generate any reputation or money for the authors anymore. To achieve that, we must anonymize the authors. All scientists get some (paid) time to write papers — if they want. What they write and if they publish it is not known to anybody. They are trusted to write something of value in that time. Universities can come up with other ways of judging which professors they hire. Interviews. Test teachings. Or the writing of an non-public application essay, which describes their past research and discoveries.

mmooss 8mo ago
The value, to society, to your field and to you institution, of being a scholar is to create new knowledge. New knowledge has no value unless you disseminate it, or publish. Another necessity is the public (usually within its field) examination of the knowledge, including discussion/debate. Knowledge is merely embryonic without those things - undeveloped, not at all reliable. That is difficult without the author able to respond. And others want to expand and build on the work, which often benefits greatly from contacting the author. In the modern (post-positivist?) approach to science, the world respects that it's written by a human who has a perspective and, despite their best intentions, biases. You can't evaluate any knowledge without knowing its source, in science or elsewhere. The first element of a citation is the author, not the title or journal (though I don't know why that happened historically). And the latter is a reason any LLM author should be identified.

kwar13 8mo ago

Took way to too long to even understand what the numbers were, or what the title is referring to...