Comment by edot
14 hours ago
Tom Dietterich (Editor in Chief at arXiv) posted on LinkedIn the other day that they’re having trouble keeping up with the onslaught of AI-generated papers. Lots of suggestions in the comments but no magic bullets.
It’s ironic that the LLMs which benefit so much from reading arXiv papers of yore are now being used to pollute it. Personally if I see a single author post 2023, I assume it’s junk, especially if they’re not from an actual research institution. Not all solo independent researchers are phonies but … many phonies are solo independent researchers.
OpenReview is okay but even some of the reviewers are apparently using LLMs or just hardly reading.
A recent review of mine had a LLM-ism at the very end, "would you like me to format this into a formal peer review report?" So they very likely copy-pasted their whole review :). I'm pretty down on academia atm ;-;
Super unfortunate. On the other side, I reviewed four papers for a top-tier AI conference and three were clearly fully Claude generated, as in all text, figures, results, everything. Actual good reviewer time is wasted on such papers and your (i hope) human written good paper receives AI responses. It's a sad state of affairs for sure.
I find it incredibly sad that this is what the world is becoming, and I mostly blame people for this, not the LLMs.
It’s the same type of people that would have no issue letting an LLM open a pull request on GitHub wasting valuable time of other humans, and whatnot.
I’m using LLMs all the time myself, but it’s so incredibly important to use it to improve the quality of your work, not degrade it. People seem to be totally oblivious about this.
On the flip side, it does make it easier to recognize people who are wasting my time.
I think this is more of a systematic issue. I review now since 2-3 years, I do not get paid, which is fine. However, it takes always a huge amount of time without really having anything from it, but I do it because it is important work.
There now so many researcher that need to publish which explains the flooding, LLM only speed it up, so reciprocal reviews take place. So now you are forced to review and you are having less and less time. So it’s a natural choice for you if you already took an LLM to write a paper to use it to review.
Perhaps one solution would be much harder entry barriers, and enforcing some guidelines. For example that a supervisor can not have more than 5 papers and PhD students only need one real paper on a major conference/journal.
You’d better not look at the average CI pipeline in software shops then
someone was a meat proxy
https://gruhn.me/blog/2026-08-03/ in case someone missed the reference
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If you see any post on arXiv you should assume it is junk. I find it ridiculous that people put any value on something being posted on arXiv. That doesn't mean the post is bad. It just means you need to find other means of judging it, for example by actually reading it.
I half agree. It used to be good, they called them "preprints" because they were already sent to a journal and somewhat expected to be accepted. Until people noticed that they were not forced to publish the "preprint" later so it got flooded with crap, hand crafted artisanal crap.
Unless you are working in the area of the paper AND know the reputation of the authors AND take a deep look, just give it the same credibility than to a random PDF posted in WordPress. They have some weak filtering because to post in the arXiv someone must vouch for you or something similar, but it's a very weak filter and people was already abusing it.
And then the AI slop truck hit...