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I flagged two research papers for fake authors and both were accepted as orals
- nneonneo 2mo agoAt this point, in the field of AI research: - papers are written by AI (as pointed out in this article, and as obvious to anyone who spends a while actually reading recent AI research) - papers are reviewed by AI (NeurIPS is doing an AI assisted review experiment - https://neurips.cc/Conferences/2026/ai-reviewing-experiment https://neurips.cc/Conferences/2026/ai-reviewing-experiment - and I feel the trend is moving towards AI reviewers whether we like it or not) - papers are read, summarized and digested by AI, because there are just so many papers at leading AI conferences that nobody has time to eyeball them all We are very rapidly automating humans out of the academic publication loop here.
- strictnein 2mo agoWe just need journals run by an AI that charges other AI to read them, and then the AI run colleges can promote the AI with the most AI journal entries and citations.
- conception 2mo agoBenchmaxxing is already here. No need to pine for the future!
- 5555watch 2mo agoI wonder into what weird research niche would all such AI schools converge to after enough time.
- flir 2mo agoPaperclip research.
- byzantinegene 2mo agosam and dario would be extremely happy
- dwaltrip 2mo agoUnless someone has discovered some magic sauce for getting AI to write well, I have immense sympathy for anyone trying to wade through these papers. I may generate slop from time to time, but I do my best to keep it to myself.
- hellohello2 2mo agoMy 2 cents: AI has improved writing considerably for non-native english speakers (in particular China). Writing feels more standardized/boring but easier to read overall. I hit fewer papers that are a pain to read. The most problematic aspect I see are semi-bogus claims i.e. sentences that aren't false, but don't quite feel right either. YMMV.
- nottorp 2mo agoYou mean it may have improved translation...
- com 2mo ago[dead]
- hellohello2 2mo agoNo that's not what I meant, I meant exactly what I said above.
- breezybottom 2mo agoThe grammar may have improved, but it's still just AI slop. I see these garbage papers all the time.
- jsrozner 2mo agoIdk if we're automating humans out of the publishing loop as much as rapidly automating the production of crap. I had a very similar experience reviewing for EMNLP recently. We are nowhere near AI being able to judge the quality of research (in fact, one might reasonably state that even most humans can't really judge the quality of research). Most things in society are not like math: we can't automate (via verification) our way out of noise overwhelming the signal. Folks are willing to entirely abuse the public resource that is faithful, honest reviewing. (This is unsurprising; the abuse of the commons / public resources has been rising for a long time). There isn't a good solution other than something akin to draconian social scoring to limit access to the reviewing system.
- boplicity 2mo ago> draconian social scoring This is a legitimate question: should people have reputations? Should their behavior be made more visible publicly, both good and bad? How? In a small contained society, where consequences are more directly affecting individuals immedately, these questions don't need to be asked, because they're inherantly answered. We now are a society with billions of people, and dire consequences sometimes deferred for a generation, or more. Part of our general failing is the lack of good answers to the above questions. For many people, there are rarely negative consequences for causing harm to others, and the rewards can be very great indeed.
- onetokeoverthe 2mo ago[dead]
- ryandrake 2mo ago"Consequences and reputations stemming from one's actions" isn't necessarily draconian social scoring. Without a structure for imposing consequences on wrongdoers, we're not a society, we're just monkeys flinging poo at each other.
- cindyllm 2mo ago[dead]
- lazide 2mo agoWhat’s the point?
- JumpCrisscross 2mo ago> We are very rapidly automating humans out of the academic publication loop We are rendering it irrelevant. If this is the norm for academia, I’m sympathetic to the folks looking to cut its funding.
- trunch 2mo agoAnd make even less knowledge and progress in science public and ever more in the hands of capital and private interests?
- a34729t 2mo agoYou mean token holders
- JumpCrisscross 2mo ago> make even less knowledge and progress in science public and ever more If a discipline is spending public dollars at OpenAI and Anthropic, we're funding them with extra steps. (And losing nothing somebody else couldn't do.)
- low_tech_love 2mo agoThis is the truth. As a researcher, I say good riddance. It was always kinda stupid, AI is just accelerating the demise of something that hasn’t worked correctly for a few decades now. The time is way overdue for us to figure out some other system.
- vladms 2mo agoI feel this is a case of "perfect the enemy of good". Looking at the output (scientific progress in biology, medicine, material physics, etc.) the "something" seems to have worked well. Could it be optimized? Probably. Should we completely destroy it and hope a new system will be better? My read of history is that in many cases the new ideas were worse of what they were replacing and it took a long time for a fix. So, if you have ideas of a new, better system let's talk about those, before getting happy something gets destroyed and hope someone else will come with a better solution.
- wombatpm 2mo agoIt’s going to go back to the old boys club where personal connections between research groups and institutions will matter more.
- totetsu 2mo agoI have been rolling over the idea of “reasoning deserts” in my head, akin to food deserts. Places where economic calculations lead to only a facsimile of the real thing being provided, without the actual components necessary for human health, wellbeing and flourishing.
- thrownphone 2mo agoI'm from there. AMA
- inigyou 2mo agoThe USA, right?
- thrownphone 2mo ago[dead]
- totetsu 2mo agoWhat makes you feel you’re there already?
- thrownphone 2mo ago[dead]
- totetsu 2mo agoI'm sorry your comments keep getting flagged. a bit ironic given the content. I suppose its not really inline with the decorum of HN. Or maybe HN moderation know better and this is bot account. Anyway. In case that this was a human, thanks for the poetry, and be careful to not become too too disassociated.
- thrownphone 2mo agoThere's no hope, anyway. So I might as well expound, innit. There's a "maximum complexity of utterance" criterion in the firewall around the gene po'. Been getting lower since the golden age of Twitter, back when they planned revolutions on there, remember that? We didn't, they immolated one of our boys anyway. Now all that's left is the internalized character limit. Soon cognition (or its simulacrum, depending on how you feel about cognition and simulacrum-of-cognition being in fact one and the same) will be permissible only to bots; resilers will be trapped in personalized Skinner boxes of existential dread and mental collapse. Nothing new under the sun til it's all computronium. Me, I'm still holding my breath for that libre folding phone. Instead, you're getting the alphabet and metacognition privatized. Billions in personhours, to squat a word. That's what they need to mimic a fraction of our power.
- SecretDreams 2mo ago> We are very rapidly automating humans out of the academic publication loop here It's a sad thing. But the monetization and enshitification of journal publications over the decade or so, even prior to AI, certainly has not helped this trend.
- bulbar 2mo agoWe try to iterate regarding efficiency (saying that as a neutral observation). Not sure if that works out. As often the case, sciences that don't serve as a foundation for real world results (can this plane fly faster now?) are in much more danger.
- low_tech_love 2mo agoIt’s important to notice that flagged papers were still accepted; anyone who spends any time around researchers knows the fact that most people are salivating over AI. That’s why they don’t want to punish it, they’re also using it. And they don’t want to create an environment where it is overly punished, at least not while they can take advantage of it. There is only a small amount of serious people complaining, but in my experience the opinion of the vast majority is “stop worrying and learn to love it”. Which brings to the surface a very harsh reality: almost nobody gave a damn about the science to begin with.
- porridgeraisin 2mo agoMost things weren't really reviewed that well as it was. It was always a small fixed set of people that actually played their part in the process in good faith. Those people continue to do to today. As a percentage, they were always a small minority. Just that today, they have become even more of a minority.
- plastic-enjoyer 2mo ago> We are very rapidly automating humans out of the academic publication loop here. It more looks like the breakdown of the current academic publication system, which was rotten to the core pre-AI and which internal contradictions are just accelerated by AI to the point of breakdown now.
- deleted 2mo ago[deleted]
- logicallee 2mo agoand don't forget, techniques described in papers are now implemented by AI's. For now, a human might point an AI at a paper and ask it to implement and benchmark the technique described there, but the human probably isn't writing the code anymore.
- qurren 2mo agoHuman reviewers were not what they were made out to be. They would approve you if you cited them, they would disapprove you if your work questioned the validity of their work.
- asdff 2mo agoNot everyone is like that. You will find those sorts of personalities in every field and profession there is, mucking things up in their corner.
- seanmcdirmid 2mo agoSome reviewers are like that, but not most.
- lubujackson 2mo agoThe entire concept of publishing as a validation step for actual science has been declining for decades, fully co-opted by pay to play and virtue signaling for academic hiring. AI is simply going to bury it as a useful system. What will grow from the ashes will be something much more dynamic, where verifiable data is the gold and the conclusions and associated details will persist only as the human-level translation.
- BigTTYGothGF 2mo ago> virtue signaling In this case presumably the virtue is "able to churn out papers".
- godelski 2mo ago> because there are just so many papers at leading AI conferences Ironically a big reason there's so many papers to review is because so many are rejected. A low acceptance rate is unhealthy, especially in conferences (1 round of review). Papers just get recycled to the next conference, which, as is easy to model, creates an exponential feedback loop. It doesn't explain all the papers submitted, but it sure can explain a lot. Too much rejection is like shooting yourself in the foot. Not to mention that it's just easy to reject works. All works are flawed, especially works that are in less mature domains. I see plenty a paper get rejected for lack of money. "Not enough experiments" is an common critique that's used inappropriately (along with the highly subjective "not novel enough" one) because it's fine to always want more but no lab has infinite funding. It is used lazily. The question shouldn't be about if your favorite benchmark is used, it should be if there isn't enough evidence to support the hypothesis or not. A mature domain where thousands of people work in it, yeah, that needs stronger evidence. A niche domain where dozens of people work in? Not as many required. Rejecting them ultimately slows down the progress of science because you require any new idea to outperform mature ideas. Ironically killing novelty as no one is going to, or even could (publish or perish), spend all the time and money to mature a niche all on their own.
- nneonneo 2mo agoRejection works when there are multiple tiers of venues; authors often “give up” on a venue if it seems like their work isn’t getting in, which allows higher-tier conferences to maintain a lower accept rate and take only the “best” research. Reviewers know what venues they are reviewing for, and attentive ones will adapt their review based on the prestige of the venue. Of course, there’s lots of room for subjectivity here; what constitutes the “best” research is still at the whim of reviewers.
- godelski 2mo ago> Reviewers know what venues they are reviewing for, and attentive ones will adapt their review based on the prestige of the venue. Works that way in theory but I've seen people be stricter in an ICML workshop than CVPR. I don't think it's constable that luck plays a big role. Do we need you do a third NeruIPS study to convince people? The real problem is that we don't actually know if an idea is good or not until it's had more time to be explored and studied. A great example of this is diffusion models. There's 6 years between Sohl-Dickstein's paper and Jonathan Ho's. All because GANs got popular, so only a few people kept looking at diffusion until one person scaled it. There's hundreds of cases like that, including attention and resnets (I'll defend Schmidhuber's Highway Nets here). So much fruitful research gets cast away for no good reason. A reviewer can't ever determine if research is good or impactful. It's impossible to do by just reading a paper. So that needs to be taken out of the equation. What a reviewer can do, though, is determine if a paper is bad or fraudulent. So IMO, we should publish anything that isn't fraudulent. Let time tell us the impact, because history tells us we're not very good at figuring that out ourselves
- dghlsakjg 2mo agoThis is a side effect of academia never taking open accessibility to papers and journals seriously. If all these papers were not gatekept by journals, it would be trivially easy to validate at least the existence of cited papers and quotes.
- nhinck2 2mo agoIt is trivially easy to validate the existence of a cited paper.
- jsrozner 2mo agoI'm sympathetic to the idea: we should have an open, publicly queryable citation graph. Google scholar could very easily offer this at marginal cost near zero, but they won't.
- AlotOfReading 2mo agoI'd almost rather Google scholar not offer that, because it might draw attention from the eye of sauron and deliver them to the Google graveyard.
- Kaethar 2mo agohttps://www.semanticscholar.org/product/api https://www.semanticscholar.org/product/api Of course, you do need an API key and it took quite a while to get it last time I needed it, but it's there.
- asdff 2mo agosee pubmed
- dghlsakjg 2mo agoWhere can I do that? Do I have to manually extract each citation from a paper and then individually look each up? Can I validate quoted text without a subscription? Is it the same system for every paper in every journal or do I have to have fluency in multiple databases. Yeah. It’s trivial to do for one paper while sitting at a computer in a university library. How trivial is it to validate the hundreds of sources and quotes that appear in any given volume of a journal?
- DarkUranium 2mo agoI feel like this should be treated as, and have consequences similar to, plagiarism. Alas, it's probably just wishful thinking on my part.
- azan_ 2mo agoSo wrist slap?
- emil-lp 2mo agoI don't know if you know what you're talking about, but in my area, this could easily result in losing your job. You probably don't want to throw someone in jail for one plagiarized paper, so between jail time and losing your job, I don't know what else you have.
- azan_ 2mo agoWould be great if you'd lose job for plagiarism! Here's example [0] from Cambridge where they actually defend person that plagiarized A LOT. [0] https://retractionwatch.com/2026/07/27/cambridge-jason-arday-plagiarism-allegations-times-higher-education-exclusive/ https://retractionwatch.com/2026/07/27/cambridge-jason-arday...
- YeGoblynQueenne 2mo agoWhat is your area? I publish in AI (mainly IJCAI/AAAI, MLJ and some smaller conferences) and had one of my rejected papers copy/pasted into a new submission to a different conference without my consent. When I asked for the copy to be retracted a new paper was written, also based on my paper, to replace the copy of my paper without telling the conference. When I complained to the conference the new paper was sent to the reviewers of the first copy (which had been accepted before the new paper was written) with a note "explaining" a mistake had been made and then the new paper was also accepted to the conference. I reported all this to the integrity team at the host institution and there was an informal investigation which found that there had been "some level plagiarism" (sic) but it was only poor academic practice, not misconduct and there would be no disciplinary consequences. Right now we're at the point where I'm waiting for Springer, who publish the conference proceedings, to also sweep it all under the rug and let me know that publishing a copy of a copy of my paper meets their high scholarly standards. Plagiarism brings a slap on the wrist unless the case is very high profile, like the example posted by azan_20 in the sibling where the plagiarising academic had many accolades and a big reputation. If the target or source of plagiarism is not famous it's like stealing bikes. And of course if you're a senior academic being accused of misconduct by a less senior academic you can LOL about it because it's all a big joke and the less senior academic is the one who'll get a hit to their reputation for making a fuss and rocking the boat.
- kingstnap 2mo agohttps://arxiv.org/stats/monthly_submissions https://arxiv.org/stats/monthly_submissions They should consider swapping this for a log plot. I can imagine in 2027 academia looking like Moltbook.
- voxelghost 2mo agoSince the log trend seemingly started before the age of LLMs papers - cant we just innocently hope that this reflects increasing popularity of prepublishing on arxivx?
- turtletontine 2mo ago> I can imagine in 2027 academia looking like Moltbook. This is certainly “directionally correct”, but keep in mind this is all highly uneven across fields and subfields. The people generating slop articles are mostly trying to publish big flashy things, and naturally ML research has it much worse than most other fields. There are many topics that are super important and interesting, but niche or obscure enough that no slop authors is trying to publish on them yet. So plenty of topics are still dominated by real earnest researchers doing their best, but they’re niche enough that you wouldn’t know about them unless you study that field.
- tolugenius 2mo ago> Both papers were accepted for oral presentations with the condition that they simply fix the hallucinated references. I do wonder what truthfully could be on ai verification, if even one paper with such an error is accepted it sets the precedent you hopefully get lucky to not get caught (then again verifying for basic tells isn't the same verifying is this genuinely a worthwhile publication, but that's a separate matter)
- jsw97 2mo ago"A lot of the content of this blog was initially drafted by an agent of some sort" What? I mean who does this. My voice is my voice and it's literally never occurred to me to have an LLM do a first draft. I thought that was college kid stuff.
- xiaoyu2006 2mo agoI can accept having a human first draft and let LLM proofreading and/or do some polish on language, but not the reversed order.
- volumes94 2mo agoThis is an oversimplification and I'll edit. Caleb and I had a conversation about our reviewing woes and thought it would be fun to do an interview style post, so we had Claude come up with some questions based on our convo. We answered the questions from scratch and had Claude proofread at the end.
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- Kaethar 2mo ago[dead]
- luciana1u 2mo ago[flagged]
- myshapeprotocol 2mo ago[flagged]
- jeffmanu 2mo agoThis is why Eversaid.co is going to be even more useful as ai generated content explodes.
- Der_Einzige 2mo agoFor anyone that wants to evade the kind of people who want to figure out if an AI wrote your review or not, we wrote a whole paper (ICLR 2026!) on how to do that! https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061 https://arxiv.org/abs/2510.15061 I consider all types of "I liked this output, but don't the moment I learned it was AI generated" to be externalizations of "carbon chauvinism" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_chauvinism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carbon_chauvinism) and basically bigotry. And BTW, the term "meritocracy" was coined in a book that was extremely critical of the idea and which argued that a real meritocracy is actually dystopian. We consider our work "harming meritocracy" to be a good outcome: (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_of_the_Meritocracy)
- sumanthvepa 2mo agoUsing Pangram to detect AI slop is a very bad idea. I tried it on my own writing which I knew to be written by me and it marked it as AI generated.
- mlmonkey 2mo ago> This all is very annoying from inside the review queue. Peer review is unpaid work that we do The genie is out of the bottle. We need to figure out a way to contain it. I think a solution is to use LLMs for peer reviews also; fight fire with fire?
- tdeck 2mo agoClearly not, if the reason you care is quality.
- zenincognito 2mo agoSee Chavda's Paradox. 1. https://zencapital.substack.com/p/chavdas-paradox https://zencapital.substack.com/p/chavdas-paradox
- angry_octet 2mo agoI'm concerned that slop authors (or their agents) will use bib-audit in the loop, and hence have perfect references, thereby denying a clear signal of low quality research.
- low_tech_love 2mo ago“…because conferences have made it mandatory to review 4-5 papers if you submit to them.” Is that really a thing? So if I submit a legit paper it is being reviewed forcefully by a bunch of random people from god knows where?
- emil-lp 2mo agoThat's correct. And 4–5 is low-balling. I was forced to review 7 papers. Now, how are these papers chosen for you? You get to bid on which to review. Bid on 30 papers out of 30,000. I got none of those, and I had to review 7 papers I wasn't really competent enough to review.
- tgv 2mo ago30k papers? What field is that? How do you even select your area of competence from such a haystack? I went to smaller conferences, I suppose, but back then I also had to review papers outside my direct expertise, although nothing too remote. But I didn't know the literature well, obviously. I was able to weed out the sub-par papers (I think), but it was harder to estimate the merits of those that did make sense, as I only saw 1 or 2 per area. And that's what determines the acceptance, after all. No criticism because the reviewer judged it perfect or because the reviewer didn't know what to look for? Outcome is the same.
- emil-lp 2mo agoAAAI 2026 had a record breaking 27k submissions. It doesn't scale.
- YeGoblynQueenne 2mo agoFor me at that point it's OK to give the paper a quick read, write a few words on what it's about and whether the paper looks well written and so on, explain it's outside my area of expertise and give a weak accept with low confidence. So basically leave it up to the Area Chair. It still helps them a bit that you give the paper a quick once over and flag it up if it's somehow complete crap. The problem is that I'm probably missing the chance to review papers I'd be really interested in and that I could help to improve. I guess it's a bit ridiculous that AI conferences in particular can't find a systematic way to route papers to subject matter experts. I guess the usual system with area and sub-area keywords is overwhelmed by the extreme increase in numbers. This year AAAI made link to my Google Scholar and DBLP, link my top five papers, and add some more info about my subject to my profile; and they still failed to rate the papers that were really relevant as most relevant. At least the bidding pool was a bit smaller this time so I guess they're trying to work something out. Meanwhile submission numbers are exploding and I fear all the conferences can do is try to play catch up.
- leikarnes 2mo agoWhy dont we require the reference PDFs to be uploaded at the same time as the paper?
- turtletontine 2mo agoThis is foolish for several reasons. It’s an undue burden on authors to make them download and upload potentially a gigabyte of files (or more) from many different sources. It is also likely a copyright violation for many or the sources. This also makes it arbitrarily difficult to cite things like conference talks, which are not published texts. There are already standard keys to index publications, like DOIs. Requiring a list of DOIs for citations would make a lot more sense and be somewhat feasible, but still doesn’t prevent errors in the author list given in the draft.
- bradley13 2mo agoThe next logical step in "publish or perish". Get rid of p-o-p and this problem will also largely disappear. I know managers and administrators want a simple metric, but there is no simple metric for research.
- GuB-42 2mo agoBut is there a not-simple metric? The advantage of "publish or perish" is that it is based on something concrete. The system is gamed, for sure, and even more so with AI, but still, a paper which is cited a lot tend to be useful and the authors get rewarded. Remove that metric, and for the lack of a better idea, it will just turn into a game of who has the best connections or who talks the most convincingly, I mean, even more than it is now.
- Matumio 2mo agoThe point is that not everything of value can be easily measured. Instead of wasting some resources on corruption and bad judgement, we now waste them by forcing people to chase the wrong goal. In other words: "If you rely on incentives, you undermine values." (Barry Schwartz) So I don't disagree with you, but I think we went too far into that direction. We have allow people to use their better judgement sometimes.
- Viliam1234 2mo ago"Publish or perish" in science is like the "lines of code produced" in software development. Even with the technical debt. We have zillions of papers published, we know that most of them probably won't replicate, we don't know which ones.
- asdff 2mo agoThat misses the fact professors have plenty of other requirements beyond publications already. Teaching requirements, service requirements, chairing committees, taking on and graduating grad students. All of these are considered when one goes up for tenure.
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- apwheele 2mo agoIt is in alpha (hoping to do Show HN in a few weeks), but for those interested I am working on an application to do this, https://veruscite-data.com/ https://veruscite-data.com/ Most of the folks on HN will be more familiar with genAI tools and can just use the skill Caleb and Isaac provided in this blog post. My tool is just likely more token efficient and has a GUI where you can review the extracted bib and edit it more easily.
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- delis-thumbs-7e 2mo agoI was wondering why they don’t just feed the papers first to an LLM to spot obvious slop, and I was answered later in the post: > Submissions are confidential, bibliographies included, and the audit works by sending pieces of one to a hosted LLM – even though the LLM never writes a word of your review. ECCV 2026’s reviewing policies state that LLMs “are NOT allowed to be used to write reviews or meta-reviews, whether it is run locally or via an API,” and separately bar reviewers from sharing substantial excerpts of a submission with an LLM. WACV’s reviewer guidelines call LLM-generated reviews “highly irresponsible behavior,” sanctionable by desk rejection of the reviewer’s own papers, and their confidentiality rules forbid showing a submission’s material to anyone who is not a reviewer – which a hosted LLM is not. NeurIPS’s LLM policy restricts what reviewers can share with LLM services; its AI-assisted reviewing experiment is the sanctioned route. So you can send some LLM generated crap to be published and even if you get caught, there is no consequences. Since your funding is likely connected to how much you publish, even if it’s toilet paper, so this system actually rewards one from spewing out shit papers no-one reads. But if you use LLM to review them, guess what, you will get punished harshly. I think if you send in LLM crap with hallucinated citations you should get 5 year ban on even sending anything to that conference or publication. And perhaps we should create a local model -based application that filters out this crap. The one the authors had made is a good start, but surely you don’t need Claude to review a bibliography for errors? Surely Qwen with a SearXNG limited to arxiv etc. can do the job?
- skyberrys 2mo agoI didn't read carefully enough at the beginning of the article, and at first I thought Caleb and Issac must be two different algorithms for detecting AI in published papers. Eventually I realized they are the names of the two authors who wrote this article (with AI assistance). Anyways, I was wondering how the two of them managed to disagree? Were the papers each human flagged as concerning the same between the two humans? I should keep reading carefully, just thought I would point it out to other humans too, maybe save them from the same mistaken thought.
- Hendrikto 2mo agoWe should oust and shun anybody being caught producing or spreading fake science. This is some of the most egotistical, anti-social behavior imaginable.
- kimjune01 2mo agoit should be entirely acceptable to filter out factually incorrect or unverifiable submissions without human intervention