alt Hacker NewsI recently desk-rejected a paper where every single citation in its Introduction was hallucinated. That means that the entire connection between what the author(s) did and how it relates to existing research was simply made up. I've never seen this happening before AI but now there's at least one paper in every cycle pulling something similar.
My problem therefore is: we are seeing more and more papers written with tools that are known to make up facts, citations, and even entire papers. And the number of papers has increased, too. I therefore see it less as "people are being more productive" and more "people are releasing bad science much faster than we can keep up with".
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While working on my PhD, there was one guy in the field that would publish new, better results to Springer every time someone improved upon benchmarks. No code, no data, no conference publications, paywall restricted, unverifiable, always the best.
I am almost certain he was "hallucinating" the results. This was in the 2010s
There are well known issues in academic publishing, though I imagine it has become much noisier like open source
Yeah but that's an issue with the researcher putting out a bad paper, and it suggests you'll have to reject more papers. We wouldn't ban email because many of the emails are spam, it just means we need new tools to filter out junk. AI will allow researchers to be more productive all together and take less time to publish a paper, which is good.