"about to" it is.

In a recent conversation with the editor-in-chief of a journal I am on the editorial board of, a substantial bulk of the submissions we get are LLM written papers that essentially randomly look for associations in accessible data, which are then sold to faculty (primarily in China).

probably not. the writing quality will improve but LLM-generated papers will still be ignored.

to the extent they aren't ignored, but seem so plausible that they are taken seriously, eventually people will want to talk to the researchers about their results, invite them to give talks, and so on. at which point it becomes problem 1.

No, probably Not. Nobody is reading these Journals anyway. It's only good one resumes. i think even 3a is Not a problem because fake papers will follow a specific pattern in Meta Analysis. Should be catched in one of the "filter" stages during Meta Analysis.