Comment by gus_massa

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...