alt Hacker NewsAt this point, in the field of AI research:
- papers are written by AI (as pointed out in this article, and as obvious to anyone who spends a while actually reading recent AI research)
- papers are reviewed by AI (NeurIPS is doing an AI assisted review experiment - https://neurips.cc/Conferences/2026/ai-reviewing-experiment - and I feel the trend is moving towards AI reviewers whether we like it or not)
- papers are read, summarized and digested by AI, because there are just so many papers at leading AI conferences that nobody has time to eyeball them all
We are very rapidly automating humans out of the academic publication loop here.
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We try to iterate regarding efficiency (saying that as a neutral observation). Not sure if that works out. As often the case, sciences that don't serve as a foundation for real world results (can this plane fly faster now?) are in much more danger.
> We are very rapidly automating humans out of the academic publication loop
We are rendering it irrelevant. If this is the norm for academia, I’m sympathetic to the folks looking to cut its funding.
We just need journals run by an AI that charges other AI to read them, and then the AI run colleges can promote the AI with the most AI journal entries and citations.
I have been rolling over the idea of “reasoning deserts” in my head, akin to food deserts. Places where economic calculations lead to only a facsimile of the real thing being provided, without the actual components necessary for human health, wellbeing and flourishing.
It’s going to go back to the old boys club where personal connections between research groups and institutions will matter more.
Unless someone has discovered some magic sauce for getting AI to write well, I have immense sympathy for anyone trying to wade through these papers.
I may generate slop from time to time, but I do my best to keep it to myself.
> We are very rapidly automating humans out of the academic publication loop here
It's a sad thing. But the monetization and enshitification of journal publications over the decade or so, even prior to AI, certainly has not helped this trend.
What’s the point?
Idk if we're automating humans out of the publishing loop as much as rapidly automating the production of crap. I had a very similar experience reviewing for EMNLP recently.
We are nowhere near AI being able to judge the quality of research (in fact, one might reasonably state that even most humans can't really judge the quality of research). Most things in society are not like math: we can't automate (via verification) our way out of noise overwhelming the signal.
Folks are willing to entirely abuse the public resource that is faithful, honest reviewing. (This is unsurprising; the abuse of the commons / public resources has been rising for a long time). There isn't a good solution other than something akin to draconian social scoring to limit access to the reviewing system.