alt Hacker News> Not in a direct interview style, but most us conferences can request additional information or feedback. If they conditionally accept or reject a paper, that conditional relies on feedback from the author(s).
Requesting feedback is useless, as the article points out - the "authors" could not answer basic questions during the interview, but after the interview were able to send full explanations to the interviewer.
If you have indirect feedback ("please answer these questions we have") the "author" will simply feed it into an LLM and send the results back. You need to get the author to do an oral defense to verify that they wrote the paper.
This is the main problem with AI generated output, whether it's a research paper, a blog, an email, a comment on a forum, similar: the value in knowing that a human wrote $X sends a signal - that the human understands what it is they wrote, even if they misunderstand the concepts.
When you get a message from someone who is a "I only used an LLM to clean it up, the thoughts are all mine"[1] person, you cannot engage with them, because they may not understand the message they transmitted, and so any human engaging with them is only burning their own time for no gain.
When you get a message from a real person, you get not only the message, you also get a signal about their understanding. That signal is missing in AI generated messages.
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[1] Sure, buddy. We believe you /s.
Replies
> I only used an LLM to clean it up, the thoughts are all mine"
I mean, it seems to me like that should be nearly everybody at this point, right? There are at least some elements of using LLMs that are the equivalent of a spell check, like asking to make sure that links work and that references are to the thing they're supposed to be, and so on. I feel like the only difference at this point is between people who do that and say that they do, and people who do that and don't say that they do.
“Requesting feedback is useless, as the article points out”, I would agree post llm availability. Before that (~pre 2023 I suppose), this wouldn’t have been as large of a concern.
“You need to get the author to do an oral defense to verify that they wrote the paper.” While I agree with this point, it can’t scale. As with the indirect response, vishing and likely video mimicry are only going to be easier with the next llm release. This leaves requiring each author who submitted a paper to fly to a place just to defend a paper in person (assuming all volunteer reviewers are in the same place).