I would go even further, and say that the idea that an academic paper should be readable by humans in 2026 is strange. The abstract and the introduction should be. The rest of it, as a reader, I can extract by talking to an LLM and asking what goes on in the paper.

I have reviewed tens of papers this way by now, and one thing I'm certain of is that I get much better understanding of the paper this way. This does not save me time usually. If anything, I now spend more time reviewing a paper, but when I'm done I know more about the paper and if I need to provide feedback, it is more substantial.

I would still prefer the abstract and the intro to be written for humans, as a sanity check. But whether the authors pored over every word, every word is "theirs" does not seem to matter much. If the ideas are good they are good, and if they are bad good writing is not a way to compensate.

Two additional observations here:

* That separation of high level and technical content is not new. Conference papers for a long time now are limited to ~9 pages and Appendix, and it was a well known secret that no one ever reads the Appendix, which contained all proofs, for instance (for all practical purposes. and I did read parts, for the record). Up to now that is, now we do read it again with LLM. No point not to do it.

* There may be a finer point of whether one can separate the ideas from the language used to convey them. But I think it can, and again, we did it for a long time with the appendices.