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The Medium comments on this post are also on point. Running the same experiment with accepted papers is a good control. Running a similar experiment with review
by fn-mote 7d ago
The Medium comments on this post are also on point. Running the same experiment with accepted papers is a good control. Running a similar experiment with reviewers would be interesting, but more obnoxious because they are not being paid.
I would keep a private blacklist (shadow ban) the authors who wasted several hours of a reviewer's time to prove they were not legitimate. The existence of such a list would be problematic, though.
Could the same system we use here be applied? Accepted authors could "vouch" for "dead" papers in case they were "auto-killed"?
This system is broken and providing more evidence that it is broken isn't much of a step towards fixing it.
- doc_ick 7d agoThat would fail, humans and agents could create new “author” accounts by the swarm or have paid author accounts.
- malfist 7d agoDo you imagine a world where people are willing to go through the legal hassle of changing their name to get past a ban for low effort journal submissions?
- doc_ick 7d agoLegal names aren’t 1:1 with author names. If they were, who’d verify that?
- otterley 7d agoValidating someone’s association with an institution by name seems like a reasonable thing to do. Perhaps it wasn’t done in the past, but times and circumstances have changed. Trust in authorship is lower than ever, and for good reason.
- doc_ick 7d agoIt likely is, but that’s also on the assumption every author has to be in association with an institution and it’s quick to verify that. What good reason is there for trust in authorship to be low? I would likely agree for if it’s related to llm-slop.
- otterley 7d agoPlagiarism, fictional data, and unreproducible results have been a problem for a some time, and LLMs are now increasingly standing in authors’ shoes. In a system that rewards production over all else, people are naturally going to be incentivized to cut corners. Some cultures that are increasingly participating in the scientific process don’t even agree as to what the ethical boundaries are.
- doc_ick 7d agoTrue, and thanks to llms are of those are being “exploited” exponentially more. “In a system that rewards production over all else, people are naturally going to be incentivized to cut corners.” That sounds like the human condition and or capitalism, advancements in cars, weapons, toys, etc… The agreement on ethical boundaries seems like a conversation held at a conference level, otherwise place a governs place b and that never goes well. I agree fully replicable experiments is a minimum for research papers. Even with caveats it should be required. That being said those who don’t want to fully prove their claims will find another venue. I think frontier models should curb or have provably verified output (chatgpt did say x) for the majority cases to help reduce or help identify the slop.
- otterley 7d ago> That sounds like the human condition and or capitalism, advancements in cars, weapons, toys, etc… Indeed it is! That's why we set up rules of the game/road/etc. that we expect participants to adhere to, and impose sanctions when they don't. We're in that uncomfortable place today where we're trying to figure out how our rules should adapt to this new era. Life is messy.
- malfist 7d agoEven if it's not a legal name, are you going to review the CV of an applicant who used a different name on every publication they claim authorship of? It's going to be pretty obvious someone is being nefarious
- doc_ick 7d agoThe CV of an applicant is definitely different. For a job application where a cv were used, that’s a slower/paid process where attention should be paid to details. However what’s a difference to a conference with a “young upcoming author” vs llm-Lorem ipsum author name?
- wpietri 6d agoWhat's the motivation to do that? Academic fraud is about building up a name.
- doc_ick 6d agoCould you please expand? I don’t believe I understand the question.
- wpietri 5d agoYou said that people could do a thing. I'm asking why they would. Academic fraud is done to boost the reputation of the academic. There isn't a lot of point in academic fraud with one paper on each of 50 fake names.
- doc_ick 5d agoAhhhh, that makes more sense. Academic fraud may not always be used to boost the reputation of an academic, it could boost the reputation of a science/technique/medicine. If you see 30 authors with 1,000s of citations saying x is superior and 3 authors saying y is superior, from a quick glance x seems a lot better. Edit: see medical studies
- Lerc 7d ago> Accepted authors could "vouch" for "dead" papers in case they were "auto-killed"? The problem isn't with the papers here though, it is the author's understanding of the paper that is in question. A paper written by some hypothetically awesome AI would be a good paper but just not really the proclaimed author's paper. I think this highlights a dual function of citations that are in tension. A citation can be to claim a stated idea has been made and tested with sufficient rigour to be published. Citation's can also be used to 'credit' others, treating reference as a type of currency. I think this latter form is an outright mistake, but entrenched in academia. The notion of giving credit like this creates a perverse incentive that lies behind much academic fraud, there is enough incentive to be the person to state something that it outweighs the requirement that person has for the statement to be true. Without that notion of credit as currency, issues like plagiarism simply disappear. In the absence of credit, someone making the same claims as someone else without referencing them is just making their own case weaker. Not necessarily less true, but less convincing. If citations were used just used to support a paper then the incentive is to cite, and failing to reference existing work harms only the author. I think there is too much "This is my idea" and not enough "I think this is true". Credit fails as a measure of effort, diligence, innovation, or truth. Careers are being made and broken by how effectively an individual can game the system.
- nkrisc 7d agoIt strikes me as akin to plagiarism. If the purported author can’t even answer basic questions about the paper, how can they plausibly claim to have written it? In the case where someone uses AI to write the paper and then deeply familiarizes themself with it, it may go undetected, but then it’s also presumably less of an issue since they have actually read it carefully and closely. If it’s still bad or wrong after that, then it’s not that different from a human writing a bad or wrong paper on their own and should be treated similarly.
- CrazyStat 7d ago> It strikes me as akin to plagiarism. If the purported author can’t even answer basic questions about the paper, how can they plausibly claim to have written it? Authorship standards differ by field. In biology, for example, it would be common to list someone as an author if they assisted in one experiment. They might be at a different institution and may be unaware of all but the vaguest outline of the paper as a whole—they just got brought onboard because they are an expert in one particular task that needed to be done. In exchange they get to be a middle author (not worth much) and develop a relationship with someone whose expertise they may need on one of their own papers in the future (the primary benefit). That is not the case here, of course—I just wanted to provide some context for your position not being universally applicable.