What are review papers for anyway? I think they are either for

1) new grad students to end up with something nice to publish after reviewing the literature or,

2) older professors to write a big overview of everything that happened in their field as sort of a “bible” that can get you up to speed

The former is useful as a social construct; I mean, hey, new grad students, don’t skimp on your literature review. Finding out a couple years in that folks had already done something sorta similar to my work was absolutely gut-wrenching.

For the latter, I don’t think LLMs are quite ready to replace the personal experiences of a late-career professor, right?

> you can generate these things in a couple of iterations with AI

The problem is you can’t. Not without careful review of the output. (Certainly not if you’re writing about anything remotely novel and thus useful.)

But not everyone knows that, which turns private ignorance into a public review problem.

A good review paper is infinitely better than an llm managing to find a few papers and making a summary. A knowledgeable researcher knows which papers are outdated and can make a trustworthy review paper, an LLM can't easily do that yet

Review papers are summarizations to recent updates in the field that deserve fellow researchers' attention. Such works should be done annually or at most quarterly in my opinion, to include only time-tested results. If hundreds of review papers are published every month, I am afraid that their quality in terms of paper selection and innovative interpretation/direction will not be much higher than the content generated by LLM, even if written word-to-word by a real scientist.

LLMs are good at plainly summarizing from the public knowledge base. Scientists should invest their time in contributing new knowledge to public base instead of doing the summarization.