alt Hacker NewsFrom my perspective as a journal editor and a reviewer these kinds of tools cause many more problems than they actually solve. They make the 'barrier to entry' for submitting vibed semi-plausible journal articles much lower, which I understand some may see as a benefit. The drawback is that scientific editors and reviewers provide those services for free, as a community benefit. One example was a submission their undergraduate affiliation (in accounting) to submit a paper on cosmology, entirely vibe-coded and vibe-written. This just wastes our (already stretched) time. A significant fraction of submissions are now vibe-written and come from folks who are looking to 'boost' their CV (even having a 'submitted' publication is seen as a benefit), which is really not the point of these journals at all.
I'm not sure I'm convinced of the benefit of lowering the barrier to entry to scientific publishing. The hard part always has been, and always will be, understanding the research context (what's been published before) and producing novel and interesting work (the underlying research). Connecting this together in a paper is indeed a challenge, and a skill that must be developed, but is really a minimal part of the process.
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I wonder if there's a way to tax the frivolous submissions. There could be a submission fee that would be fully reimbursed iff the submission is actually accepted for publication. If you're confident in your paper, you can think of it as a deposit. If you're spamming journals, you're just going to pay for the wasted time.
Maybe you get reimbursed for half as long as there are no obvious hallucinations.
Is it at all possible to have a policy that bans the submission of any AI written text, or text that was written with the assistance of AI tools? I understand that this would, by necessity, be under an "honor system" but maybe it could help weed out papers not worth the time?
This keeps repeating in different domains: we lower the cost of producing artifacts and the real bottleneck is evaluating them.
For developers, academics, editors, etc... in any review driven system the scarcity is around good human judgement not text volume. Ai doesn't remove that constraint and arguably puts more of a spotlight on the ability to separate the shit from the quality.
Unless review itself becomes cheaper or better, this just shifts work further downstream and disguising the change as "efficiency"
I generally agree.
On the other hand, the world is now a different place as compared to when several prominent journals were founded (1869-1880 for Nature, Science, Elsevier). The tacit assumptions upon which they were founded might no longer hold in the future. The world is going to continue to change, and the publication process as it stands might need to adapt for it to be sustainable.
Completely agree. Look at the independent research that gets submitted under "Show HN" nowadays:
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...
I appreciate and sympathize with this take. I'll just note that, in general, journal publications have gone considerably downhill over the last decade, even before the advent of AI. Frequency has gone up, quality has gone down, and the ability to actually check if everything in the article is actually valid is quite challenging as frequency goes up.
This is a space that probably needs substantial reform, much like grad school models in general (IMO).
I am very sympathetic to your point of view, but let me offer another perspective. First off, you can already vibe-write slop papers with AI, even in LaTeX format--tools like Prism are not needed for that. On the other hand, it can really help researchers improve the quality of their papers. I'm someone who collaborates with many students and postdocs. My time is limited and I spend a lot of it on LaTeX drudgery that can and should be automated away, so I'm excited for Prism to save time on writing, proofreading, making TikZ diagrams, grabbing references, etc.
I'm scared that this type of thing is going to do to science journals what AI-generated bug reports is doing to bug bounties. We're truly living in a post-scarcity society now, except that the thing we have an abundance of is garbage, and it's drowning out everything of value.