Comment by wackget
18 hours ago
I'm not familiar with the world of academic publishing, so I want to ask: how is the industry making sure that submissions aren't at least partially AI-generated?
Is it standard practice for authors to have to defend their submissions via interview like this? If not, why not?
Does the vetting process vary with the quality of the publisher?
As an outsider, it's extremely worrying that anyone would even attempt to submit an AI-generated paper for publication in an academic journal. At that level I would have assumed literally everybody should know better than to even try.
> Is it standard practice for authors to have to defend their submissions via interview like this? If not, why not?
It isn't, but maybe it should be. For post-grad qualifications oral defense is standard, and I didn't mind defending my central thesis then, and won't mind now.
Not in a direct interview style, but most us conferences can request additional information or feedback. If they conditionally accept or reject a paper, that conditional relies on feedback from the author(s).
Interviews like this are interesting, but in no way can scale to the infinite paper slop conferences are facing.
> Not in a direct interview style, but most us conferences can request additional information or feedback. If they conditionally accept or reject a paper, that conditional relies on feedback from the author(s).
Requesting feedback is useless, as the article points out - the "authors" could not answer basic questions during the interview, but after the interview were able to send full explanations to the interviewer.
If you have indirect feedback ("please answer these questions we have") the "author" will simply feed it into an LLM and send the results back. You need to get the author to do an oral defense to verify that they wrote the paper.
This is the main problem with AI generated output, whether it's a research paper, a blog, an email, a comment on a forum, similar: the value in knowing that a human wrote $X sends a signal - that the human understands what it is they wrote, even if they misunderstand the concepts.
When you get a message from someone who is a "I only used an LLM to clean it up, the thoughts are all mine"[1] person, you cannot engage with them, because they may not understand the message they transmitted, and so any human engaging with them is only burning their own time for no gain.
When you get a message from a real person, you get not only the message, you also get a signal about their understanding. That signal is missing in AI generated messages.
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[1] Sure, buddy. We believe you /s.
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I’ve only published a few papers, but this interview sounds extremely unusual to me (I mean, it is clearly a special thing that the editor is doing, which is fine). I wouldn’t do something unethical, but if I had and the editor asked me for an interview like this, I’d know I’d probably been caught.
Why is it unusual: it sounds extremely time-consuming.
As to how worrying AI-generated papers are… it sounds more like a headache for the editors really.
In general, journals don’t have to be perfect; mostly researchers read research papers. You already have to read critically (publish-or-perish has been a thing for a while, so there are plenty of not-so-great papers out there). Peer review is just the “entry” barrier, science is a social process and papers become more or less influential based on a fuzzy process of citation, conference talks, and peer-to-peer suggestions.
> it sounds extremely time-consuming.
For whom? Surely the authors can find an hour after submitting the paper to a journal?
Beware that a reviewer easily spend a full week on reviewing a paper, and there are typically three of them. So if one hour of conversation can save three weeks work, it sounds worth it.
I was thinking for the reviewer. Also note that I was only answering as to why it wasn’t done in the past.
For the time comparison, I’m not sure, it doesn’t seem quite apples-to-apples:
1) It is scheduled time vs unscheduled.
2) There must be some base rate consideration… the papers being discussed here were planned to be desk-rejected.
Maybe it could be a good process for saving papers that were going to be desk-rejected, but I dunno, that seems like it’d just lower the quality standards.
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The rates of paper publishing show that everyone must be using ai now or the rates wouldn't have gone up