Science Is Drowning in AI Slop
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
This article has a bit more depth and talks about how it's been a problem far longer than GPT. arXiv has caused it's fair share (by making publishing easier/cheaper not because it encourages fraud). Then there's Zenodo - seemingly just a spam source on HN.
[0]: (37 points, 4 days ago) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50323925
we use payed platforms for papers, the usual ones, and they are still riddled with this slop. its incredible. U really need to find good researchers and only stick to their outputs, which sadly makes it very hard for new, honest, researchers to make any impression. A lot are simply skipped with a 'i dont know that guy and cant be bothered anymore' kind of tiredness.
I can only compared it to 'alert fatigue' in a security operations center, so many false positives a true positive might be mindlessly skipped as false. But with papers reading the things is much more time consuming... so its perhaps even more annoying and frustrating.
the worst one i saw was a 'paper' where people generafed a questionaire with an LLM, sent it to 6 'field experts' (random friends in the field) and then ran the answers through LLM and poof, paper done. made me want to chuck my laptop out the window.