alt Hacker NewsI'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.
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There's this thing where all the thought leaders in software engineering ask "What will change about building about building a business when code is free" and while, there are some cool things, I've also thought, like it could have some pretty serious negative externalities? I think this question is going to become big everywhere - business, science, etc. which is like - Ok, you have all this stuff, but do is it valuable? Which of it actually takes away value?
Digital pollution.
The first casualty of LLMs was the slush pile--the unsolicited submission pile for publishers. We've since seen bug bounty programs and open source repositories buckle under the load of AI-generated contributions. And all of these have the same underlying issue: the LLM makes it easy to do things that don't immediately look like garbage, which makes the volume of submission skyrocket while the time-to-reject also goes up slightly because it passes the first (but only the first) absolute garbage filter.
In a corollary to Sturgeon's Law, I'd propose Altman's Law: "In the Age of AI, 99.999...% of everything is crap"