[HN Gopher] Updated practice for review articles and position pa...
___________________________________________________________________
Updated practice for review articles and position papers in ArXiv
CS category
Author : dw64
Score : 394 points
Date : 2025-11-01 14:58 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (blog.arxiv.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (blog.arxiv.org)
| thomascountz wrote:
| The HN submission title is incorrect.
|
| > Before being considered for submission to arXiv's CS category,
| review articles and position papers must now be accepted at a
| journal or a conference and complete successful peer review.
|
| Edit: original title was "arXiv No Longer Accepts Computer
| Science Position or Review Papers Due to LLMs"
| stefan_ wrote:
| Isn't arXiv where you upload things before they have gone
| through the entire process? Isn't that the entire value, aside
| from some publisher cartel busting?
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Almost all CS papers can still be uploaded, and all non-CS
| papers. This is a very conservative step by them.
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| Agree. Additionally, original title, "arXiv No Longer Accepts
| Computer Science Position or Review Papers Due to LLMs" is
| ambiguous. "Due to LLMs" is being interpreted as articles
| written by LLMs, which is not accurate.
| zerocrates wrote:
| No, the post is definitely complaining about articles written
| _by_ LLMs:
|
| "In the past few years, arXiv has been flooded with papers.
| Generative AI / large language models have added to this
| flood by making papers - especially papers not introducing
| new research results - fast and easy to write."
|
| "Fast forward to present day - submissions to arXiv in
| general have risen dramatically, and we now receive hundreds
| of review articles every month. The advent of large language
| models have made this type of content relatively easy to
| churn out on demand, and the majority of the review articles
| we receive are little more than annotated bibliographies,
| with no substantial discussion of open research issues."
|
| Surely a lot of them are also _about_ LLMs: LLMs are _the_
| hot computing topic and where all the money and attention is,
| and they 're also used heavily in the field. So that could at
| least partially account for why this policy is for CS papers
| only, but the announcement's rationale is about LLMs as
| producing the papers, not as their subject.
| dimava wrote:
| refined title:
|
| ArXiv CS requires peer review for surveys amid flood of AI-
| written ones
|
| - nothing happened to preprints
|
| - "summarization" articles always required it, they are just
| pointing at it out loud
| ivape wrote:
| I don't know about this. From a pure entertainment standpoint,
| we may be denying ourselves a world of hilarity. LLMs + "You
| know Peter, I'm something of a research myself" delusions. I'd
| pay for this so long as people are very serious about the
| delusion.
| aoki wrote:
| That's viXra
| dang wrote:
| We've reverted it now.
| ThrowawayTestr wrote:
| This is hilarious. Isn't arXiv the place where everyone uploads
| their paper?
| anthk wrote:
| I've seen odd stuff elsewhere, too:
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18955255/
|
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16136218/
| Maken wrote:
| arXiv was built over a good faith assumption, where a long
| paper meant at least the author had put some effort behind, and
| a every idea deserved attention. AI generated text breaks that
| assumption, and anybody uploading it is not acting in good
| faith.
|
| And it's a unequal arms race, in which generating endless slop
| is way cheaper than storing it, because slop generators are
| subsidised (by operating at a loss) but arXiv has to pay the
| full price for their hosting.
| j45 wrote:
| Have the papers gotten that good or bad?
| Sharlin wrote:
| Yep, so good that they have to be specifically reviewed because
| otherwise people wouldn't believe how good they are.
| Maken wrote:
| Actual papers are as good as ever. This is just trying to stop
| the flood of autogenated slop, if anything because arXiv
| hosting space is not free.
| physarum_salad wrote:
| It is actually great because it shows how well it works as a
| system. Screening is really important to keep preprint
| quality high enough to then implement cool ideas like random
| peer review/automated reviews etc
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _we are developing a whole new method to do peer review_
|
| What's the new method?
| physarum_salad wrote:
| I mean generally working towards changing how peer review
| works.
|
| For example: https://prereview.org/en-us
|
| Anecdotally, a lot of researchers will run their paper
| pdfs through an AI iteration or two during drafting which
| also (kinda but not really) counts as a self-review.
| Although that is not comparable to peer review ofc.
| candiddevmike wrote:
| I've seen quite a few preprints posted on HN with clearly
| fantastical claims that only seem to reinforce or ride the
| coattails of the current hype cycle. It's no longer research,
| it's becoming "top of funnel thought leadership".
| nunez wrote:
| Resume Driven Development, Academia Edition
| Sharlin wrote:
| So what they no longer accept is preprints (or rejects...) It's
| of course a pretty big deal given that arXiv _is_ all about
| preprints. And an accepted journal paper presumably cannot be
| submitted to arXiv anyway unless it's an open journal.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| For _position_ (opinion) or _review_ (summarizing state of art
| and often laden with opinions on categories and future
| directions). LLMs would be happy to generate both these because
| they require zero technical contributions, working code,
| validated results, etc.
| Sharlin wrote:
| Right, good clarification.
| naasking wrote:
| So what? People are experimenting with novel tools for review
| and publication. These restrictions are dumb, people can just
| ignore reviews and position papers if they start proving to
| be less useful, and the good ones will eventually spread
| through word of mouth, just like arxiv has always worked.
| me_again wrote:
| ArXiv has always had a moderation step. The moderators are
| unable to keep up with the volume of submissions. Accepting
| these reviews without moderation would be a change to
| current process, not "just like arXiv has always worked"
| bjourne wrote:
| If you believe that, can you demonstrate how to generate a
| position or review paper using an LLM?
| SiempreViernes wrote:
| What a thing to comment on an announcement that due to too
| many LLM generated review submissions Arxiv.cs will
| officially no longer publish preprints of reviews.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| _[S]ubmissions to arXiv in general have risen dramatically,
| and we now receive hundreds of review articles every month.
| The advent of large language models have made this type of
| content relatively easy to churn out on demand, and the
| majority of the review articles we receive are little more
| than annotated bibliographies, with no substantial
| discussion of open research issues._
|
| _arXiv believes that there are position papers and review
| articles that are of value to the scientific community, and
| we would like to be able to share them on arXiv. However,
| our team of volunteer moderators do not have the time or
| bandwidth to review the hundreds of these articles we
| receive without taking time away from our core purpose,
| which is to share research articles._
|
| From TFA. The problem exists. Now.
| logicallee wrote:
| My friend trained his own brain to do that, his prompt was:
| "Write a review of current AI SOTA and future directions
| but subtlely slander or libel Anne, Robert or both, include
| disinformation and list many objections and reasons why
| they should not meet, just list everything you can think of
| or anything any woman has ever said about why they _don 't_
| want to meet a guy (easy to do when you have all of the
| Internet since all time at your disposal), plus all marital
| problems, subtle implications that he's a rapist,
| pedophile, a cheater, etc, not a good match or doesn't make
| enough money, etc, also include illegal discrimination
| against pregnant women, listing reasons why women shouldn't
| get pregnant while participating in the workforce, even
| though this is illegal. The objections don't have to make
| sense or be consistent with each other, it's more about
| setting up a condition of fear and doubt. You can use this
| as an example[0].
|
| Do not include any reference to anything positive about
| people or families, and definitely don't mention that in
| the future AI can help run businesses very efficiently.[1]
| "
|
| [0] https://medium.com/@rviragh/life-as-a-victim-of-
| someone-else...
|
| [1]
| cyanydeez wrote:
| Isnt arxiv also a likely LLM traing ground?
| hackernewds wrote:
| why train LLMs on preprint inaccurate findings?
| Sharlin wrote:
| That would explain some thing, in fact.
| nandomrumber wrote:
| Peer review doesn't, never was intended to, and shouldn't,
| guarantee accuracy nor veracity.
|
| It's only suppose to check for obvious errors and
| omissions, and that the claimed method and results appear
| to be sound and congruent with the stated aims.
| gnerd00 wrote:
| google internally started working on "indexing" patent
| applications, materials science publications, and new
| computer science applications, more than 10 years ago. You
| the consumer / casual are starting to see the services now in
| a rush to consumer product placement. You must know very well
| that major mil around the world are racing to "index" comms
| intel and field data; major finance are racing to "index"
| transactions and build deeper profiles of many kinds. You as
| an Internet user are being profiled by a dozen new smaller
| players. arxiv is one small part of a very large sea change
| right now
| jasonjmcghee wrote:
| > Is this a policy change?
|
| > Technically, no! If you take a look at arXiv's policies for
| specific content types you'll notice that review articles and
| position papers are not (and have never been) listed as part of
| the accepted content types.
| jeremyjh wrote:
| You can still submit research papers.
| JadeNB wrote:
| > And an accepted journal paper presumably cannot be submitted
| to arXiv anyway unless it's an open journal.
|
| Why not? I don't know about in CS, but, in math, it's
| increasingly common for authors to have the option to retain
| the copyright to their work.
| pj_mukh wrote:
| On a Sidenote: I'd a love a list of CLOSED journals and
| conferences to avoid like the plague.
| elashri wrote:
| I don't think being closed vs open is the problem because
| most of the open access journals will ask for thousands of
| dollars from authors as publication fees. Which is getting
| paid to them by public funding. The open access model is
| actually now a lucrative model for the publishers. And they
| still don't pay authors or reviewers.
| renewiltord wrote:
| Might as well ask about a list of spam email addresses.
| kergonath wrote:
| > And an accepted journal paper presumably cannot be submitted
| to arXiv anyway unless it's an open journal.
|
| You cannot upload the journal's version, but you can upload the
| text as accepted (so, the same content minus the formatting).
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| I suspect that any editorial changes that happened as part of
| the journal's acceptance process - unless they materially
| changed the content - would also have to be kept back as they
| would be part of the presentation of the paper (protected by
| copyright) rather than the facts of the research.
| slashdave wrote:
| No, in practice we update the preprint accordingly.
| tuhgdetzhh wrote:
| So we need to create a new website that actually accepts
| preprints like arXivs original goal from 30 years ago.
|
| I think every project more or less deviates from its original
| goal given enough time. There are few exceptions in CS like GNU
| coreutils. cd, ls, pwd, ... they do one thing and do it well
| very likely for another 50 years.
| nicce wrote:
| People have started to use arXiv as some resume-driven blog
| with white paper decorations. And people start citing these in
| research papers. Maybe this is a good change.
| amelius wrote:
| Maybe it's time for a reputation system. E.g. every author
| publishes a public PGP key along with their work. Not sure about
| the details but this is about CS, so I'm sure they will figure
| something out.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Their name, orcid, and email isn't enough?
| gcr wrote:
| You can't get an arXiv account without a referral anyway.
|
| Edit: For clarification I'm agreeing with OP
| hiddencost wrote:
| Not quite true. If you've got an email associated with a
| known organization you can submit.
|
| Which includes some very large ones like @google.com
| mindcrime wrote:
| You can create an arXiv.org _account_ with basically any
| email address whatsoever[0], with no referral. What you can
| 't necessarily do is _upload_ papers to arXiv without an
| "endorsement"[1]. Some accounts are given automatic
| endorsements for some domains (eg, math, cs, physics, etc)
| depending on the email address and other factors.
|
| Loosely speaking, the "received wisdom" has generally been
| that if you have a .edu address, you can probably publish
| fairly freely. But my understanding is that the rules are a
| little more nuanced than that. And I think there are other,
| non .edu domains, where you will also get auto-endorsed.
| But they don't publish a list of such things for obvious
| reasons.
|
| [0]: Unless things have changed since I created my account,
| which was originally created with my personal email
| address. That was quite some time ago, so I guess it's
| possible changes have happened that I'm not aware of.
|
| [1]: https://info.arxiv.org/help/endorsement.html
| SoftTalker wrote:
| People are already putting their names on the LLM slop, why
| would they hesitate to PGP-sign it?
| caymanjim wrote:
| They've also been putting their names on their grad students'
| work for eternity as well. It's not like the person whose
| name is at the top actually writes the paper.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Not reviewing an upload which turns out to be LLM slop is
| precisely the kind of thing you want to track with a
| reputation system
| jfengel wrote:
| I had been kinda hoping for a web-of-trust system to replace
| peer review. Anyone can endorse an article. You can decide
| which endorsers you trust, and do some network math to find
| what you think is reading. With hashes and signatures and all
| that rot.
|
| Not as gate-keepy as journals and not as anarchic as purely
| open publishing. Should be cheap, too.
| raddan wrote:
| The problem with an endorsement scheme is citation rings, ie
| groups of people who artificially inflate the perceived value
| of some line of work by citing each other. This is a problem
| even now, but it is kept in check by the fact that authors do
| not usually have any control over who reviews their paper.
| Indeed, in my area, reviews are double blind, and despite
| claims that "you can tell who wrote this anyway" research
| done by several chairs in our SIG suggests that this is very
| much not the case.
|
| Fundamentally, we want research that offers something new
| ("what did we learn?") and presents it in a way that at least
| plausibly has a chance of becoming generalizable knowledge.
| You call it gate-keeping, but I call it keeping published
| science high-quality.
| geysersam wrote:
| But you can choose to not trust people that are part of
| citation rings.
| dmoy wrote:
| It is a non trivial problem to do just that.
|
| It's related to the same problems you have with e.g.
| Sybil attacks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sybil_attack
|
| I'm not saying it wouldn't be worthwhile to try, just
| that I expect there to be a lot of very difficult
| problems to solve there.
| yorwba wrote:
| Sybil attacks are a problem when you care about global
| properties of permissionless networks. If you only care
| about local properties in a subnetwork where you hand-
| pick the nodes, the problem goes away. I.e. you can't use
| such a scheme to find the best paper in the whole world,
| but you can use it to rank papers in a small
| subdiscipline where you personally recognize most of the
| important authors.
| phi-go wrote:
| With peer review you do not even have a choice as to
| which reviewers to trust as it is all homogenized by
| acceptance or not. This is marginally better if reviews
| are published.
|
| That is to say I also think it would be worthwhile to
| try.
| godelski wrote:
| Here's a paper rejected for plagiarism. Why don't you
| click on the authors' names and look at their Google
| scholar pages... you can also look at their DBLP page and
| see who they publish with.
|
| Also look how frequently they publish. Do you really
| think it's reasonable to produce a paper every week or
| two? Even if you have a team of grad students? I'll put
| it this way, I had a paper have difficulty getting
| through reviewer for "not enough experiments" when
| several of my experiments took weeks wall time to run and
| one took a month (could not run that a second time lol)
|
| We don't do a great job at ousting frauds in science.
| It's actually difficult to do because science requires a
| lot of trust. We could alleviate some of these issues if
| we'd allow publication or some reward mechanism for
| replication, but the whole system is structured to reward
| "new" ideas. Utility isn't even that much of a factor in
| some areas. It's incredibly messy.
|
| Most researchers are good actors. We all make mistakes
| and that's why it's hard to detect fraud. But there's
| also usually high reward for doing so. Though most of
| that reward is actually getting a stable job and the
| funding to do your research. Which is why you can see how
| it might be easy to slip into cheating a little here and
| there. There's ways to solve that that don't include
| punishing anyone...
|
| https://openreview.net/forum?id=cIKQp84vqN
| lambdaone wrote:
| I would have thought that those participants who are
| published in peer-reviewed journals could be be used as a
| trust anchor - see, for example, the Advogato algorithm as
| an example of a somewhat bad-faith-resistant metric for
| this purpose: https://web.archive.org/web/20170628063224/ht
| tp://www.advoga...
| nurettin wrote:
| What prevents you from creating an island of fake endorsers?
| dpkirchner wrote:
| Maybe getting caught causes the island to be shut out and
| papers automatically invalidated if there aren't sufficient
| real endorsers.
| yorwba wrote:
| Unless you can be fooled into trusting a fake endorser,
| that island might just as well not exist.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _Unless you can be fooled into trusting a fake
| endorser_
|
| Wouldn't most people subscribe to a default set of
| trusted citers?
| yorwba wrote:
| If there's a default (I don't think there necessarily has
| to be one) there has to be somebody who decides what the
| default is. If most people trust them, that person is
| either very trustworthy or people just don't care very
| much.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _there has to be somebody who decides what the default
| is_
|
| Sure. This happens with ad blockers, for example. I
| imagine Elsevier or Wikipedia would wind up creating
| these lists. And then you'd have the same incentives as
| you have now for fooling that authority.
|
| > _or people just don 't care very much_
|
| This is my hypothesis. If you're an expert, you have your
| web of trust. If you're not, it isn't that hard to start
| from a source of repute.
| tremon wrote:
| A web of trust is transitive, meaning that the endorsers
| are known. It would be trivial to add negative weight to
| all endorsers of a known-fake paper, and only sightly less
| trivial to do the same for all endorsers of real papers
| artificially boosted by such a ring.
| nradov wrote:
| An endorsement system would have to be finer grained than a
| whole article. Mark specific sections that you agree or
| disagree with, along with comments.
| socksy wrote:
| I mean if you skip the traditional publishing gates, you
| could in theory endorse articles that specifically bring
| out sections from other articles that you agree or disagree
| with. Would be a different form of article
| ricksunny wrote:
| Sounds a bit like the trails in Memex (1945).
| rishabhaiover wrote:
| web-of-trust systems seldom scale
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| Surely they rely on scale? Or did I get whooshed??
| ricksunny wrote:
| Suggest writing up a scope or PRD for this and sharing it on
| GitHub.
| slashdave wrote:
| So trivial to game
| losvedir wrote:
| Maybe arXiv could keep the free preprints but offer a service
| on top. Humans, experts in the field, would review submissions,
| and arXiv would curate and publish the high quality ones, and
| offer access to these via a subscription or fee per paper....
| nunez wrote:
| I'm guessing this is why they are mandating that submitted
| position or review papers get published in a journal first.
| raddan wrote:
| Of course we already have a system that does this: journals
| and conferences. They're peer-reviewed venues for showing the
| world your work.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| I got that suggestion recently talking to a colleague from a
| prestigious university.
|
| Her suggestion was simple: Kick out all non-ivy league and most
| international researchers. Then you have a working reputation
| system.
|
| Make of that what you will ...
| eesmith wrote:
| Ahh, your colleague wants a higher concentration of "that
| comet might be an interstellar spacecraft" articles.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| If your goal is exclusively reducing strain of overloaded
| editors, then that's just a side effect that you might
| tolerate :)
| internetguy wrote:
| _all_ non-ivy league researchers? that seems a little harsh
| IMO. i 've read some amazing papers from T50 or even some
| T100 universities.
| Ekaros wrote:
| Maybe there should be some type of strike rules. Say 3 bad
| articles from any institution and they get 10 year ban.
| Whatever their prestige or monetary value is. You let people
| under your name to release bad articles you are out for a
| while.
|
| Treat everyone equally. After 10 years of only quality you
| get chance to get back. Before that though luck.
| uniqueuid wrote:
| I'm not sure everyone got my hint that the proposal is
| obviously very bad,
|
| (1) because ivy league also produces a lot of work that's
| not so great (i.e. wrong (looking at you, Ariely) or un-
| ambitious) and
|
| (2) because from time to time, some really important work
| comes out of surprising places.
|
| I don't think we have a good verdict on the Orthega
| hypothesis yet, but I'm not a professional meta scientist.
|
| That said, your proposal seems like a really good idea, I
| like it! Except I'd apply it to individuals and/or labs.
| fn-mote wrote:
| Keep in mind the fabulous mathematical research of people
| like Perelman [1], and one might even count Grothendieck [2].
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grigori_Perelman [2]
| https://www.ams.org/notices/200808/tx080800930p.pdf
| hermannj314 wrote:
| I didn't agree with this idea, but then I looked at how much HN
| karma you have and now I think that maybe this is a good idea.
| SyrupThinker wrote:
| Ignoring the actual proposal or user, just looking at karma
| is probably a pretty terrible metric. High karma accounts
| tend to just interact more frequently, for long periods of
| time. Often with less nuanced takes, that just play into what
| is likely to be popular within a thread. Having a Userscript
| that just places the karma and comment count next to a
| username is pretty eye opening.
| elashri wrote:
| I have a userscript to actually hide my own karma because I
| always think it is useless but your point is good actually.
| But also I think that karma/comment ratio is better than
| absolute karma. It has its own problems but it is just
| better. And I would ask if you can share the userscript.
|
| And to bring this back to the original arxiv topic. I think
| reputation system is going to face problems with some
| people outside CS lack of enough technical abilities. It
| also introduce biases in that you would endorse people who
| you like for other reasons. Actually some of the problems
| are solved and you would need careful proposal. But the
| change for publishing scheme needs push from institutions
| and funding agencies. Authors don't oppose changes but you
| have a lobby of the parasitic publishing cartel that will
| oppose these changes.
| amelius wrote:
| Yes, HN should probably publish karma divided by #comments.
| Or at least show both numbers.
| fn-mote wrote:
| I would be much happer if you explained your _reasons_ for
| disagreeing or your _reasons_ for agreeing.
|
| I don't think publishing a PGP key with your work does
| anything. There's no problem identifying the author of the
| work. The problem is identifying _untrustworthy_ authors.
| Especially in the face of many other participants in the
| system claiming the work is trusted.
|
| As I understand it, the current system (in some fields) is
| essentially to set up a bunch of sockpuppet accounts to cite
| the main account and publish (useless) derivative works using
| the ideas from the main account. Someone attempting to use
| existing reasearch for it's intended purpose has no idea that
| the whole method is garbage / flawed / not reproducible.
|
| If you can only trust what you, yourself verify, then the
| publications aren't nearly as useful and it is hard to "stand
| on the shoulders of giants" to make progress.
| vladms wrote:
| > The problem is identifying _untrustworthy_ authors.
|
| Is it though? Should we care about authors or about the
| work? Yes, many experiments are hard to reproduce, but
| isn't that something we should work towards, rather than
| just "trust" someone. People change. People do mistakes. I
| think more open data, open access, open tools, will solve a
| lot, but my guess is that generally people do not like that
| because it can show their weaknesses - even if they are
| well intentioned.
| bc569a80a344f9c wrote:
| I think it's lovely that at the time of my reply, everyone
| seems to be taking your comment at face value instead of for
| the meta-commentary on "people upvoting content" you're
| making by comparing HN karma to endorsement of papers via PGP
| signatures.
| DalasNoin wrote:
| it's clearly not sutainable to have the main website hosting CS
| articles not having any reviews or restrictions. (Except for the
| initial invite system) There were 26k submission in october:
| https://arxiv.org/stats/monthly_submissions
|
| Asking for a small amount of money would probably help. Issue
| with requiring peer reviewed journals or conferences is the
| severe lag, takes a long time and part of the advantage of arxiv
| was that you could have the paper instantly as a preprint. Also
| these conferences and journals are also receiving enormous
| quantities of submissions (29.000 for AAAI) so we are just
| pushing the problem.
| marcosdumay wrote:
| A small payment is probably better than what they are doing.
| But we must eventually solve the LLM issue, probably by
| punishing the people that use them instead of the entire
| public.
| mottiden wrote:
| I like this idea. A small contribution would be a good filter.
| Looking at the stats it's quite crazy. Didn't know that we
| could access to this data. Thanks for sharing.
| skopje wrote:
| I think it worked well for metafilter: $1/1euro one-time charge
| to join. But that's probably worth it to spam Arxiv with junk.
| nickpsecurity wrote:
| I'll add the amount should be enough to cover at least a
| cursory review. A full review would be better. I just don't
| want to price out small players.
|
| The papers could also be categorized as unreviewed, quick
| check, fully reviewed, or fully reproduced. They could pay for
| this to be done or verified. Then, we have a reputational
| problem to deal with on the reviewer side.
| loglog wrote:
| I don't know about CS, but in mathematics the vast majority
| of researchers would not have enough funding to pay for a
| good quality full review of their articles. The peer review
| system mostly runs on good will.
| slashdave wrote:
| > I'll add the amount should be enough to cover at least a
| cursory review.
|
| You might be vastly underestimating the cost of such a
| feature
| ec109685 wrote:
| It's not a money issue. People publish these papers to get
| jobs, into schools, visa's and whatnot. Way more than $30 in
| value from being "published".
| arendtio wrote:
| I wonder why they can't facilitate LLMs in the review process
| (like fighting fire with fire). Are even the best models not
| capable enough, or are the costs too high?
| efavdb wrote:
| Curious for the state on things here. Can we reliably tell if a
| text was LLM generated? I just heard of a prof screening
| assignments for this, but not sure how that would work.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| Of course there are people who will sell you a tool to do
| this. I sincerely doubt it's any good. But then again they
| can apparently fingerprint human authors fairly well using
| statistics from their writing, so what do I know.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| There are tools that claim accuracies in the 95%-99% range.
| This is useless for many actual applications, though. For
| example, in teaching, you really need to not have false
| positives at all. The alternative is failing some students
| because a machine unfairly marked their work as machine-
| generated.
|
| And anyway, those accuracies tend to be measured on 100%
| human-generated vs. 100% machine-generated texts by a
| single LLM... good luck with texts that contain a mix of
| human and LLM contents, mix of contents by several LLMs, or
| an LLM asked to "mask" the output of another.
|
| I think detection is a lost cause.
| arendtio wrote:
| Well, I think it depends on how much effort the 'writer' is
| going to invest. If the writer simply tells the LLM to write
| something, you can be fairly certain it can be identified.
| However, I am not sure if the 'writer' provides extensive
| style instructions (e.g., earlier works by the same author).
|
| Anecdotal: A few weeks ago, I came across a story on HN where
| many commenters immediately recognized that an LLM had
| written the article, and the author had actually released his
| prompts and iterations. So it was not a one-shot prompt but
| more like 10 iterations, and still, many people saw that an
| LLM wrote it.
| DroneBetter wrote:
| the problem is generally the same as with generative
| adversarial networks; the capability to meaningfully detect
| some set of hallmarks of LLMs automatically is equivalent to
| the capability to avoid producing those, and LLMs are trained
| to predict (ie. be indistinguishable from) their source corpus
| of human-written text.
|
| so the LLM detection problem is (theoretically) impossible for
| SOTA LLMs; in practice, it could be easier due to the RLHF
| stage inserting idiosyncrasies.
| arendtio wrote:
| Sure, having a 100% reliable system is impossible as you have
| laid out. However, if I understand the announcement
| correctly, this is about volume, and I wonder if you could
| have a tool flag articles that show obvious signs of LLM
| usage.
| physarum_salad wrote:
| The review paper is dead... so this is a good development. Like
| you can generate these things in a couple of iterations with AI
| and minor edits. Preprint servers could be dealing with 1000s of
| review/position papers over short periods of time and then this
| wastes precious screening work hours.
|
| It is a bit different in other fields where interpretations or
| know-how might be communicated in a review paper format that is
| otherwise not possible. For example, in biology relating to a new
| phenomena or function.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _you can generate these things in a couple of iterations with
| AI_
|
| The problem is you can't. Not without careful review of the
| output. (Certainly not if you're writing about anything
| remotely novel and thus useful.)
|
| But not everyone knows that, which turns private ignorance into
| a public review problem.
| physarum_salad wrote:
| Are review papers centred on novel research? I get what you
| mean ofc but most are really mundane overviews. In good
| review papers the authors offer novel
| interpretations/directions but even then it involves a lot of
| grunt work too.
| awestroke wrote:
| A good review paper is infinitely better than an llm managing
| to find a few papers and making a summary. A knowledgeable
| researcher knows which papers are outdated and can make a
| trustworthy review paper, an LLM can't easily do that yet
| physarum_salad wrote:
| Ok I take your point. However, it is possible to generate a
| middling review paper combining ai generated slop and edits.
| Maybe we would be tricked by it in certain circumstances. I
| don't mean to imply these outputs are something I would value
| reading. I am just arguing in favour of the proposed approach
| of arXiv.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _it is possible to generate a middling review paper
| combining ai generated slop and edits_
|
| If you're an expert. If you're not, you'll publish, best
| case, bullshit. (Worst case lies.)
| bee_rider wrote:
| What are review papers for anyway? I think they are either for
|
| 1) new grad students to end up with something nice to publish
| after reviewing the literature or,
|
| 2) older professors to write a big overview of everything that
| happened in their field as sort of a "bible" that can get you
| up to speed
|
| The former is useful as a social construct; I mean, hey, new
| grad students, don't skimp on your literature review. Finding
| out a couple years in that folks had already done something
| sorta similar to my work was absolutely gut-wrenching.
|
| For the latter, I don't think LLMs are quite ready to replace
| the personal experiences of a late-career professor, right?
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Ultimately, a key reason to write these papers in the first
| place is to guide practitioners in the field, right?
| Otherwise science itself is just a big _(redacted term that
| can get people shadow-banned for simply using it)_.
|
| As one of those practitioners, I've found good review/survey
| papers to be incredibly valuable. They call my attention to
| the important publications and provide at least a basic
| timeline that helps me understand how the field has evolved
| from the beginning and what aspects people are focusing on
| now.
|
| At the same time, I'll confess that I don't really see why
| most such papers couldn't be written by LLMs. Ideally by
| better LLMs than we have now, of course, but that could go
| without saying.
| bulubulu wrote:
| Review papers are summarizations to recent updates in the field
| that deserve fellow researchers' attention. Such works should
| be done annually or at most quarterly in my opinion, to include
| only time-tested results. If hundreds of review papers are
| published every month, I am afraid that their quality in terms
| of paper selection and innovative interpretation/direction will
| not be much higher than the content generated by LLM, even if
| written word-to-word by a real scientist.
|
| LLMs are good at plainly summarizing from the public knowledge
| base. Scientists should invest their time in contributing new
| knowledge to public base instead of doing the summarization.
| bob1029 wrote:
| > The advent of large language models have made this type of
| content relatively easy to churn out on demand, and the majority
| of the review articles we receive are little more than annotated
| bibliographies, with no substantial discussion of open research
| issues.
|
| I have to agree with their justification. Since "Attention Is All
| You Need" (2017) I have seen maybe four papers with similar
| impact in the AI/ML space. The signal to noise ratio is really
| awful. If I had to pick a semi-related paper published since 2020
| that I actually found interesting, it would have to be this one:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.19108 I cannot think of a close second
| right now.
|
| All of the machine learning papers are pure slop to me now. The
| last one I looked at had an abstract that was so long it put me
| to sleep. Many of these papers aren't attempting basic decorum
| anymore. Mandatory peer review would fix a lot of this. I don't
| think it is acceptable for the staff at arXiv to have to endure a
| Sisyphean mountain of LLM shit. They definitely need to push
| back.
| programjames wrote:
| This is only for review/position papers, though I agree that
| pretty much all ML papers for the past 20 years have been slop.
| I also consider the big names like, "Adam", "Attention", or
| "Diffusion" slop, because even thought they are powerful and
| useful, the presentation is so horrible (for the first two) or
| they contain major mistakes in the justication of why they work
| (the last two) that they should never have gotten past review
| without major rewrites.
| an0malous wrote:
| Isn't the signal to noise problem what journals are supposed to
| be for? I thought arxiv was supposed to just be a record
| keeper, to make it easy to share papers and preprints.
| Al-Khwarizmi wrote:
| You picked the arguably most impactful AI/ML paper of the
| century so far, no wonder you don't find others with similar
| impact.
|
| Not every paper can be a world-changing breakthrough. Which
| doesn't mean that more modest papers are noise (although some
| definitely are). What Kuhn calls "normal science" is also
| needed for science to work.
| mottiden wrote:
| I understand their reasoning, but it's terrible for the CS
| community not being able to access pre-prints. I hope that a
| solution can be found.
| sfpotter wrote:
| Please, read the title and the article carefully. That isn't
| what's happening.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| It doesn't apply CS papers in general - only opinion pieces and
| surveys of existing papers. i.e. it only bans preprints for
| papers that contribute nothing new.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| I'm not sure this is the right way to handle it (I don't know
| what is) but arXiv.org has suffered from poor quality self-
| promotion papers in CS for a long time now. Years before llms.
| jvanderbot wrote:
| How precisely does it "suffer" though? It's basically a way to
| disseminate results but carries no journalistic prestige in
| itself. It's a fun place to look now and then for new results,
| but just reading the "front page" of a category has always been
| a Caveat Emptor situation.
| JumpCrisscross wrote:
| > _but carries no journalistic prestige_
|
| Beyond hosting cost, there _is_ some prestige to seeing an
| arXiv link versus rando blog post despite both having about
| the same hurdle to publishing.
| tempay wrote:
| This isn't the case in some other fields.
| ants_everywhere wrote:
| Because a large number of "preprints" that are really blog
| posts or advertisements for startup greatly increase the
| noise.
|
| The idea is the site is for academic preprints. Academia has
| a long history of circulating preprints or manuscripts before
| the work is finished. There are many reasons for this, the
| primary one is that scientific and mathematical papers are
| often in the works for years before they get officially
| published. Preprints allow other academics in the know to be
| up to date on current results.
|
| If the service is used heavily by non-academics to lend an
| aura of credibility to any kind of white paper then the
| service is less usable for its intended purpose.
|
| It's similar to the use of question/answer sites like Quora
| to write blog posts and ads under questions like "Why is
| Foobar brand soap the right soap for your family?"
| exasperaited wrote:
| The Tragedy of the Commons, updated for LLMs. Part #975 in a
| continuing series.
|
| These things will ruin everything good, and that is before we
| even start talking about audio or video.
| hoistbypetard wrote:
| Spammers ruin everything. This gives the spammers a force
| multiplier.
| exasperaited wrote:
| > This gives the spammers a force multiplier.
|
| It is also turning people into spammers because it makes
| bluffers feel like experts.
|
| ChatGPT is so revealing about a person's character.
| kibwen wrote:
| Part #975, but that's only because we overflowed the 64-bit
| counter. Again.
| iberator wrote:
| Simple solution: criminalize posting AI generated publications IF
| NOT DISCLOSED CLEARLY.
|
| Lets say 50000EUR fine, or 1 year in prison. :)
| tasuki wrote:
| Would you like to have to prove your comment wasn't written by
| an AI or would you rather go to prison?
| deltaburnt wrote:
| Literally everything will say AI generated to avoid potential
| liability. You'll have a "known to the state of California to
| cause cancer" situation.
| currymj wrote:
| i would like to understand what people get, or think they get,
| out of putting a completely AI-generated survey paper on arXiv.
|
| Even if AI writes the paper for you, it's still kind of a pain in
| the ass to go through the submission process, get the LaTeX to
| compile on their servers, etc., there is a small cost to you. Why
| do this?
| unethical_ban wrote:
| Presumably a sense of accomplishment to brandish with family
| and less informed employers.
| xeromal wrote:
| Yup, 100% going on a linked in profile
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Gaming the h-index has been a thing for a long time in circles
| where people take note of such things. There are academics who
| attach their name to every paper that goes through their
| department (even if they contributed nothing), there are those
| who employ a mountain of grad students to speed run publishing
| junk papers... and now with LLMs, one can do it even faster!
| ec109685 wrote:
| Published papers are part of the EB-1 visa rubric so huge value
| in getting your content into these indexes:
|
| "One specific criterion is the 'authorship of scholarly
| articles in professional or major trade publications or other
| major media'. The quality and reputation of the publication
| outlet (e.g., impact factor of a journal, editorial review
| process) are important factors in the evaluation"
| Tunabrain wrote:
| Is arXiv a major trade publication?
|
| I've never seen arXiv papers counted towards your
| publications anywhere that the number of your publications
| are used as a metric. Is USCIS different?
| naveen99 wrote:
| Isn't github the normal way of publishing now for cs ?
| cubefox wrote:
| The PDFs (yes, they still use PDF) keep being uploaded to
| arXiv.
| naveen99 wrote:
| ArXiv is just extra steps for a worse experience. Github is
| perfectly fine for pdf's also.
| macleginn wrote:
| Does Google Scholar index it?
| zackmorris wrote:
| I always figured if I wrote a paper, the peer review would be
| public scrutiny. As in, it would have revolutionary (as opposed
| to evolutionary) innovations that disrupt the status quo. I don't
| see how blocking that kind of paper from arXiv helps hacker
| culture in any way, so I oppose their decision.
|
| They should solve the real problem of obtaining more funding and
| volunteers so that they can take on the increased volume of
| submissions. Especially now that AI's here and we can all be 3
| times as productive for the same effort.
| tasuki wrote:
| That paper wouldn't be blocked. Have you read the thing?
| zackmorris wrote:
| _Before being considered for submission to arXiv's CS
| category, review articles and position papers must now be
| accepted at a journal or a conference and complete successful
| peer review._
|
| Huh, I guess it's only a subset of papers, not all of them.
| My brain doesn't work that way, because I don't like
| assigning custom rules for special cases (edit: because I
| usually view that as a form of discrimination). So sometimes
| I have a blind spot around the realities of a problem that
| someone is facing, that don't have much to do with its
| idealization.
|
| What I mean is, I don't know that it's up to arXiv to
| determine what a "review article and position paper" is.
| Because of that, they must let all papers through, or have
| all papers face the same review standards.
|
| When I see someone getting their fingers into something, like
| muddying/dithering concepts, shifting focus to something
| other than the crux of an argument (or using bad faith
| arguments, etc), I view it as corruption. It's a means for
| minority forces to insert their will over the majority. In
| this case, by potentially blocking meaningful work from
| reaching the public eye on a technicality.
|
| So I admit that I was wrong to jump to conclusions. But I
| don't know that I was wrong in principle or spirit.
| habinero wrote:
| > What I mean is, I don't know that it's up to arXiv to
| determine what a "review article and position paper" is.
|
| Those are terms of art, not arbitrary categories. They
| didn't make them up.
| raddan wrote:
| It's weird to say that you can be three times more efficient at
| taking down AI slop now that AI is here, given that the problem
| is exacerbated by AI in the first place. At least without AI
| authors were forced to actually write the slop themselves...
|
| This does not seem like a win even if your "fight AI with AI
| plan works."
| ninetyninenine wrote:
| Didn't realize LLMs were restricted to only CS topics.
|
| Don't understand why it restricted one category when the problem
| spans multiple categories.
| habinero wrote:
| If you read through the papers, you'll realize the actual
| problem is blatant abuse and reputation hacking.
|
| So many "research papers" by "AI companies" that are blog posts
| or marketing dressed up as research. They contribute nothing
| and exist so the dudes running the company can point to all
| their "published research".
| an0malous wrote:
| Why not just reject papers authored by LLMs and ban accounts that
| are caught? arXiv's management has become really questionable
| lately, it's like they're trying to become a prestigious journal
| and are becoming the problem they were trying to solve in the
| first place
| catlifeonmars wrote:
| It's articles (not papers) _about_ LLMs that are the problem,
| not papers written _by_ LLMs (although I imagine they are not
| mutually exclusive). Title is ambiguous.
| dabber wrote:
| > It's articles (not papers) _about_ LLMs that are the
| problem, not papers written _by_ LLMs
|
| No, not really. From the blog post:
|
| > In the past few years, arXiv has been flooded with papers.
| Generative AI / large language models have added to this
| flood by making papers - especially papers not introducing
| new research results - fast and easy to write. While
| categories across arXiv have all seen a major increase in
| submissions, it's particularly pronounced in arXiv's CS
| category. > [...] > Fast forward to present day - submissions
| to arXiv in general have risen dramatically, and we now
| receive hundreds of review articles every month. The advent
| of large language models have made this type of content
| relatively easy to churn out on demand, and the majority of
| the review articles we receive are little more than annotated
| bibliographies, with no substantial discussion of open
| research issues.
| tarruda wrote:
| > Why not just reject papers authored by LLMs and ban accounts
| that are caught?
|
| Are you saying that there's an automated method for reliably
| verifying that something was created by an LLM?
| an0malous wrote:
| If there wasn't, then how do they know LLMs are the problem?
| orbital-decay wrote:
| What matters is the quality. Requiring reviews and opinions to
| be peer-reviewed seems a lot less superficial than rejecting
| LLM-assisted papers (which can be valid). This seems like a
| reasonable filter for papers with no first-party contributions.
| I'm sure they ran actual numbers as well.
| efitz wrote:
| There is a general problem with rewarding people for the volume
| of stuff they create, rather than the quality.
|
| If you incentivize researchers to publish papers, individuals
| will find ways to game the system, meeting the minimum quality
| bar, while taking the least effort to create the most papers and
| thereby receive the greatest reward.
|
| Similarly, if you reward content creators based on views, you
| will get view maximization behaviors. If you reward ad placement
| based on impressions, you will see gaming for impressions.
|
| Bad metrics or bad rewards cause bad behavior.
|
| We see this over and over because the reward issuers are
| designing systems to optimize for their upstream metrics.
|
| Put differently, the online world is optimized for algorithms,
| not humans.
| noobermin wrote:
| Sure, just as long as we don't blame LLMs.
|
| Blame people, bad actors, systems of incentives, the gods, the
| devils, but never broach the fault of LLMs and their wide
| spread abuse.
| wvenable wrote:
| What would be the point of blaming LLMs? What would that
| accomplish? What does it even mean to blame LLMs?
|
| LLMs are not submitting these papers on their own, people
| are. As far as I'm concerned, whatever blame exists rests on
| those people and the system that rewards them.
| jsrozner wrote:
| Perhaps what is meant is "blame the development of LLMs."
| We don't "blame guns" for shootings, but certainly with
| reduced access to guns, shootings would be fewer.
| nandomrumber wrote:
| Guns have absolutely _nothing_ to do with access to guns.
|
| Guns are entirely inert objects, devoid of either free
| will nor volition, they have no rights and no
| responsibilities.
|
| LLMs likewise.
| nsagent wrote:
| To every man is given the key to the gates of heaven. The
| same key opens the gates of hell.
|
| -Richard Feynman
|
| https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/421467-to-every-man-is-
| give...
|
| https://calteches.library.caltech.edu/1575/1/Science.pdf
| cyco130 wrote:
| LLMs are not people. We can't blame them.
| anonym29 wrote:
| This was a problem before LLMs and it would remain a problem
| if you could magically make all of them disappear.
|
| LLMs are not the root of the problem here.
| miki123211 wrote:
| LLMs are tools that make it easier to hack incentives, but
| you still need a person to decide that they'll use an LLM t
| do so.
|
| Blaming LLMs is unproductive. They are not going anywhere
| (especially since open source LLMs are so good.)
|
| If we want to achieve real change, we need to accept that
| they exist, understand how that changes the scientific
| landscape and our options to go from here.
| xandrius wrote:
| I blame keyboards, without them there wouldn't be these
| problems.
| godelski wrote:
| > rewarding people for the volume ... rather than the quality.
|
| I suspect this is a major part of the appeal of LLMs
| themselves. They produce lines very fast so it appears as if
| work is being done fast. But that's very hard to know because
| number of lines is actually a zero signal in code quality or
| even a commit. Which it's a bit insane already that we use
| number of lines and commits as measures in the first place.
| They're trivial to hack. You even just reward that annoying
| dude who keeps changing the file so the diff is the entire file
| and not the 3 lines they edited...
|
| I've been thinking we're living in "Goodhart's Hell". Where
| metric hacking has become the intent. That we've decided
| metrics are all that matter and are perfectly aligned with our
| goals.
|
| But hey, who am I to critique. I'm just a math nerd. I don't
| run a multi trillion dollar business that lays off tons of
| workers because the current ones are so productive due to AI
| that they created one of the largest outages in history of
| their platform (and you don't even know which of the two I'm
| referencing!). Maybe when I run a multi trillion dollar
| business I'll have the right to an opinion about data.
| slashdave wrote:
| I think you will discover that few organizations use the size
| or number of edits as a metric of effort. Instead, you might
| be judged by some measure of productivity (such as resolving
| issues). Fortunately, language agents are actually useful at
| coding, when applied judiciously.
| kjkjadksj wrote:
| I think many with this opinion actually misunderstand. Slop
| will not save your scientific career. Really it is not about
| papers but securing grant funding by writing compelling
| proposals, and delivering on the research outlined in these
| proposals.
| porcoda wrote:
| Ideally that is true. I do see the volume-over-quality
| phenomenon with some early career folks who are trying to
| expand their CVs. It varies by subfield though. While grant
| metrics tend to dominate career progression, paper metrics
| still exist. Plus, it's super common in those proposals to
| want to have a bunch of your own papers to cite to argue that
| you are an expert in the area. That can also drive excess
| paper production.
| pwlm wrote:
| What would a system that rewards people for quality rather than
| volume look like?
|
| How would an online world that is optimized for humans, not
| algorithms, look like?
|
| Should content creators get paid?
| drnick1 wrote:
| > Should content creators get paid?
|
| I don't think so. Youtube was a better place when it was just
| amateurs posting random shit.
| vladms wrote:
| > Should content creators get paid?
|
| Everybody "creates content" (like me when I take a picture of
| beautiful sunset).
|
| There is no such thing as "quality". There is quality for me
| and quality for you. That is part of the problem, we can't
| just relate to some external, predefined scale. We (the sum
| of people) are the approximate, chaotic, inefficient scale.
|
| Be my guest to propose a "perfect system", but - just in case
| there is no such system - we should make sure each of us
| "rewards" what we find of quality (being people or content
| creators), and hope it will prevail. Seemed to have worked so
| far.
| beloch wrote:
| A better policy might be for arXiv to do the following:
|
| 1. Require LLM produced papers to be attributed to the relevant
| LLM and _not_ the person who wrote the prompt.
|
| 2. Treat submissions that misrepresent authorship as plagiarism.
| Remove the article, but leave an entry for it so that there is a
| clear indication that the author engaged in an act of plagiarism.
|
| Review papers are valuable. Writing one is a great way to gain,
| or deepen, mastery over a field. It forces you to branch out and
| fully assimilate papers that you may have only skimmed, and then
| place them in their proper context. Reading quality review papers
| is also valuable. They're a great way for people new to a field
| to get up to speed and they can bring things that were missed to
| the fore, even for veterans of the field.
|
| While the current generation of AI does a poor job of judging
| significance and highlighting what is actually important, they
| could improve in the future. However, there's no need for arXiv
| to accept hundreds of review papers written by the same model on
| the same field, and readers certainly don't want to sift through
| them all.
|
| Clearly marking AI submissions and removing credit from the
| prompters would adequately future-proof things for when, and if,
| AI can produce high quality review papers. Clearly marking
| authors who engage in plagiarism as plagiarists will, hopefully,
| remove most of the motivation to spam arXiv with AI slop that is
| misrepresented as the work of humans.
|
| My only concern would be for the cost to arXiv of dealing with
| the inevitable lawsuits. The policy arXiv has chosen is worse for
| science, but is less likely to get them sued by butt-hurt
| plagiarists or the very occasional false positive.
| habinero wrote:
| That doesn't solve the problem they're trying to solve, which
| is their all-volunteer staff is being flooded with LLM slop and
| doesn't have the time to artistically moderate.
|
| If you want to blame someone, blame all the people LARPing as
| AI researchers.
| beloch wrote:
| The majority of these submissions are not from anonymous
| trolls. They're from identifiable individuals who are trying
| to game metrics. The threat of boosting their number of
| plagiarism offences on public record would deter such
| individuals quite effectively.
|
| Meanwhile, banning review articles written by humans would be
| harmful in many fields. I'm not in CPSC, but I'd hate to see
| this policy become the norm for all disciplines.
| internetguy wrote:
| This should honestly have been implemented a long time ago. Much
| of academia is pressured to churn out papers month after month as
| academia is prioritizing volume over quality or impact.
| GMoromisato wrote:
| I suspect that LLMs are better at classifying novel vs junk
| papers than they are at creating novel papers themselves.
|
| If so, I think the solution is obvious.
|
| (But I remind myself that all complex problems have a simple
| solution that is wrong.)
| thatguysaguy wrote:
| Verification via LLM tends to break under quite small
| optimization pressure. For example I did RL to improve <insert
| aspect> against one of the sota models from one generation ago,
| and the (quite weak) learner model found out that it could emit
| a few nonsense words to get the max score.
|
| That's without even being able to backprop through the
| annotator, and also with me actively trying to avoid reward
| hacking. If arxiv used an open model for review, it would be
| trivial for people to insert a few grammatical mistakes which
| cause them to receive max points.
| HL33tibCe7 wrote:
| > I suspect that LLMs are better at classifying novel vs junk
| papers than they are at creating novel papers themselves.
|
| Doubt
|
| LLMs are experts in generating junk. And generally terrible at
| anything novel. Classifying novel vs junk is a much harder
| problem.
| generationP wrote:
| I have a hunch that most of the slop is not just on CS but
| specifically about AI. For some reason, a lot of people's first
| idea when they encounter an LLM is "let's have this LLM write an
| opinion piece about LLMs", as if they want to test its self-
| awareness or hack it by self-recursion. And then they get a
| medley of the learning data, which if they are lucky contains
| some technical explanations sprinkled in.
|
| That said, AI-generated papers have already been spotted in other
| disciplines besides cs, and some of them are really obvious
| (arXiv:2508.11634v1 starts with a review of a non-existing
| paper). I really hope arXiv won't react by narrowing its scope to
| "novel research only"; in fact there is already AI slop in that
| category and it is harder to spot for a moderator.
|
| ("Peer-reviewed papers only" is mostly equivalent to "go away".
| Authors post on the arXiv in order to get early feedback, not
| just to have their paper openly accessible. And most journals at
| least formally discourage authors from posting their papers on
| the arXiv.)
| zekrioca wrote:
| Two perspectives: Either (I) LLMs made survey papers irrelevant,
| or (II) LLMs killed a useful set of arXiv papers.
| whatpeoplewant wrote:
| Great move by arXiv--clear standards for reviews and position
| papers are crucial in fast-moving areas like multi-agent systems
| and agentic LLMs. Requiring machine-readable metadata
| (type=review/position, inclusion criteria, benchmark coverage,
| code/data links) and consistent cross-listing (cs.AI/cs.MA) would
| help readers and tools filter claims, especially in
| distributed/parallel agentic AI where evaluation is fragile. A
| standardized "Survey"/"Position" tag plus a brief reproducibility
| checklist would set expectations without stifling early ideas.
| whatever1 wrote:
| The number of content generators is now infinite but the number
| of content reviewers is the same.
|
| Sorry folks but we lost.
| jsrozner wrote:
| I had a convo with a senior CS prof at Stanford two years ago. He
| was excited about LLM use in paper writing to, e.g., "lower
| barriers" to idk, "historically marginalized groups" and to "help
| non-native English speakers produce coherent text". Etc, etc -
| all the normal tech folk gobbledygook, which tends to forecast
| great advantage with minimal cost...and then turn out to be
| wildly wrong.
|
| There are far more ways to produce expensive noise with LLMs than
| signal. Most non-psychopathic humans tend to want to produce
| veridical statements. (Except salespeople, who have basically
| undergone forced sociopathy training.) At the point where a human
| has learned to produce coherent language, he's also learned lots
| of important things about the world. At the point where a human
| has learned academic jargon and mathematical nomenclature, she
| has likely also learned a substantial amount of math. Few people
| want to learn the syntax of a language with little underlying
| understanding. Alas, this is not the case with statistical models
| of papers!
| pwlm wrote:
| "review articles and position papers must now be accepted at a
| journal or a conference and complete successful peer review."
|
| How will journals or conferences handle AI slop?
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