alt Hacker NewsThe reasons listed in TFA - "confidentiality, sensitive data and compromising authors’ intellectual property" - make sense to discourage reviewers from using cloud-based LLMs.
There are also reasons for discouraging the use LLMs in peer review at all: it defeats the purpose of peer in the peer review; hallucinations; criticism not relevant to the community; and so on.
However, I think it's high time to reconsider what scientific review is supposed to be. Is it really important to have so-called peers as gatekeepers? Are there automated checks we can introduce to verify claims or ensure quality (like CI/CD for scientific articles), and leave content interpretation to the humans?
Let's make the benefits and costs explicit: what would we be gaining or losing if we just switched to LLM-based review, and left the interpretation of content to the community? The journal and conference organizers certainly have the data to do that study; and if not, tool providers like EasyChair do.
Replies
> However, I think it's high time to reconsider what scientific review is supposed to be
The old days the bottleneck was the physical sending out of papers. Now that's cheap. So make comments public. We're all on the same side. The people that will leave reviews are more likely to actually be invested in the topic rather than doing review as purely a service. It's not perfect but no system will be and we currently waste lots of time chasing reviewers
When you measure something people will start to game it. CI/CD needs a firm hand to work.
Better to completely drop review, don't you think?
LLMs simply don't do science. They have no integrity.
There is no "bullshit me" step in the scientific process
Yes, there are often strong reasons to have peers as gatekeepers. Scientific writing is extremely information-dense. Consider a niche technical task that you work on -- now consider summarizing a day's worth of work in one or two sentences, designed to be read by someone else with similar expertise. In most scientific fields, the niches are pretty small, The context necessary to parse that dense scientific writing into a meaningful picture of the research methods is often years/decades of work in the field. Only peers are going to have that context.
There are also strong reasons why the peers-as-gatekeepers model is detrimental to the pursuit of knowledge, such as researchers forming semi-closed communities that bestow local political power on senior people in the field, creating social barriers to entry or critique. This is especially pernicious given the financial incentives (competition for a limited pool of grant money; award of grant money based on publication output) that researchers are exposed to.