Comment by nativeit
1 day ago
> Between 2020 and 2025, submissions to NeurIPS increased more than 220% from 9,467 to 21,575. In response, organizers have had to recruit ever greater numbers of reviewers, resulting in issues of oversight, expertise alignment, negligence, and even fraud.
I don’t think the point being made is “errors didn’t happen pre-GPT”, rather the tasks of detecting errors have become increasingly difficult because of the associated effects of GPT.
> rather the tasks of detecting errors have become increasingly difficult because of the associated effects of GPT.
Did the increase to submissions to NeurIPS from 2020 to 2025 happen because ChatGPT came out in November of 2022? Or was AI getting hotter and hotter during this period, thereby naturally increasing submissions to ... an AI conference?
I was an area chair on the NeurIPS program committee in 1997. I just looked and it seems that we had 1280 submissions. At that time, we were ultimately capped by the book size that MIT Press was willing to put out - 150 8-page articles. Back in 1997 we were all pretty sure we were on to something big.
I'm sure people made mistakes on their bibliographies at that time as well!
And did we all really dig up and read Metropolis, Rosenbluth, Rosenbluth, Teller, and Teller (1953)?
Edited to add: Someone made a chart! Here: https://papercopilot.com/statistics/neurips-statistics/
You can see the big bump after the book-length restriction was lifted, and the exponential rise starting ~2016.
I cited Watson and Crick '53 in my PhD thesis and I did go dig it up and read it.
I had to go to the basement of the library, use some sort of weird rotating knob to move a heavy stack of journals over, find some large bound book of the year's journals, and navigate to the paper. When I got the page, it had been cut out by somebody previous and replaced with a photocopied verison.
(I also invested a HUGE amount of my time into my bibliography in every paper I've written as first author, curating a database and writing scripts to format in the various journal formats. This involved multiple independent checks from several sources, repeated several times.
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> And did we all really dig up and read Metropolis, Rosenbluth, Rosenbluth, Teller, and Teller (1953)?
If you didn't, you are lying. Full stop.
If you cite something, yes, I expect that you, at least, went back and read the original citation.
The whole damn point of a citation is to provide a link for the reader. If you didn't find it worth the minimal amount of time to go read, then why would your reader? And why did you inflict it on them?
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I guess the way one would verify that this is more general trend in academia would be to run this on accepted papers to a non-AI conference?