> The guy's name is "nosloP" spelled backwards. Maybe spelled normally it's supposed to signify the opposite.

Most insightful comment

> AI submissions, soon AI reviewers, and shortly after only AI readers

This is already happening. Write code with an AI agent, agent creates PR, other agents review, coding agent iterates, PR gets merged, and hopefully real humans use the application and provide feedback

The latter step is also now staring to be replaced by AI (user directs agent to access app, get data, perform actions)

Similar thing with email

And here I thought it was "Poison" with a typo...

https://www.pangram.com/history/51744f24-1896-4d5c-8bfc-786c...

It isn't even partially human written, it's just an LLM's output.

That the name in no slop backwards is too wild to be real, but it's a real person.

I mean it's everywhere now. I complained already at my workplace multiple times, we get huge Claude generated documents, which people then ask Claude to summarize. I don't mind some of it in principle but people are too lazy now to input all the details so you get a bunch of fantasies that were explicitly ruled out already. It's tiring.

IIUC he claims that most of them are just internal notes. In the research group I am, we generate a lot of crap. I'm not sure we reach one per day, but probably 3 per week, but we have some "productive" weeks from time to time.

Sometimes I just write an email (in text) but sometimes it's a short LaTeX document (3 pages, title, date, my name, may have an introduction to ensure we use the same notation, usually no references because I'm lazy). Some of my coworkers are using AI that likes to make longer stuff and format it like a letter to the Nobel foundation.

Some are good, most are wrong or bad. Some are reproductions of others research work, some are early experiments, some are rediscovering the wheel, some are misguided ideas, and lucky a tiny part are good. Anyway, they are for internal use, we don't try to contribute to the thermal death of the universe uploading that crap to a free preprint server.

I don't understand:

a) Why they upload internal notes/reports to a preprint server?

b) Why are these reported as "academic papers"?

This is similar to when Elon claims to be running what, 4-5 different companies as a ceo, and taking care of his children, and sleeping 6 hours a day, and then we observe him shitposting on Twitter constantly or showing off his gaming skills in a game that is literally a time gated grindfest.

You add up all the claimed activities and then realize it’s more hours than are in a day so someone’s lying.

I don’t see how this author can claim that these papers didn’t “…suddenly materialize from a magical “chatbot” in 2026” when it’s obvious that 1-2 people are not producing 258 papers that are tens of pages each in 9 months with any sort of academic rigor.

I think it might be taking a position in the use of AI, They don't appear to be concealing their use.

If the papers were of a uniformly high standard then I might not have a problem with it.

If they are hoping some of them are good and the review process will filter out the bad then it seems like they are not doing research, they are writing hypotheses and at pushing the work of testing them onto the reviewers.

I could also see that being done to make some sort of statement about the review process, but it's not clear if that is their goal.

He's wasting people's time, which is already the resource that many people lack any to spare. I'm not sure if he realises this part.

This is economics though, a discipline where you be like Kenneth Rogoff and Carmen Reinhart and commit the most impactful fraud of the century and face absolutely no consequence on your career.

When you compare that to the consequence of the hydroxycholoquine paper, which is comparable in public policy impact, where Didiee Raoult lost all its legitimacy and his job, it's easy to see that economics as an academic field doesn't value probity much.

It's incentivized by the system. You get grants, clout, importance, job opportunities based on your publishing in major conferences. As of last year, the variance of review scores have been higher between reviewers on the same paper than between the same reviewer on different paper. So it's effectively become a coinflip. The best strategy when it's random is just to spam stuff.

Oh also at least 40% generated peer-reviews are contributing to this statistic.

Because they won't. The various algorithms that create the "publish or perish" incentives actually reward this. Academic reputation isn't a term in those algorithms, so it isn't rewarded. Same for verifying other's papers and other parts of science and research that aren't actually publishing papers. This is the cause of the reproducibility crisis in academic.

"Show me the incentives and I will show you the outcome"

Not surprising. Many academics held in high-esteem in these behavioral offshoots are nothing more than frauds to begin with. Almost every X-studies paper is equally fluff these days (see the recent frontpage CHI post) - at least these have some semblance of theory given their equations, though are still largely garbage.

If amoral, they could have been emboldened by exposure to AI use, either their own or by other students, colleagues, etc., while lacking inherent moral pressures for/against slop.

If moral, they could have decided that propagating their message will improve the world, even if only at x% efficiency due to use of AI, and that their intentions will take precedence over being accused of slopping.

If immoral, they could have chosen to run a grift on the chance that no one would notice, overdone it, and then played every card in their hand while perhaps sweeping away evidence of their slop once caught.

(These are constructed teaching examples, not situation-specific inferences or claims.)

More and more evidence is surfacing that suggests AI addiction is real. It may be as simple as that Nicholas Polson has developed a severe case of AI addiction.

A ton of academia is based on putting out slop into not so well-read journals and crossing fingers it passes some dead-exhausted postdoc TA's peer review.

AI psychosis? They think they're actually putting out high-quality papers. Nothing else makes sense.

Maybe to expose the utter uselessness of "papers".

If the past 30 years have shown us anything, it's that academic credentials and reputation are very difficult to blemish.

Polson is just pushing the knob to 11 because it's louder.

We've been in the dark ages of science for so many decades...

One of the most memorable tech talks I ever attended was by a junior engineer who had just come back to the office from a major conference. Our workplace had an unusually oral culture -- decisions were made in meetings, and not always written down; there wasn't much in the way of bug tracking or work planning at the time; people generally preferred to talk through problems instead of working them out in email, chat, or forum posting.

He was supposed to present a topic he learned about at the conference. Instead, he gave a cheeky talk which introduced the very concept of written language to the audience, as if we had never heard of it. Starting from the history of writing on tablets and so on, and ending in practical advice like, "when words are written down, you don't have to remember what they were exactly; you can just read the words again." I loved the chutzpah and could barely hold myself from chortling out loudly at some of his slides.

its not even writing, its the very concept of human thinking that is under question.

Why should anyone bother to think, if they can ask AI for a well researched, correct, and.. khm... "aligned" answer ?

We will be worse off for it. People just are losing the ability to read well. We are regressing as a species because of billionaire's thinking machines. A few companies are evolving while the rest of us become dependent.

Your intelligence and competencey are going to be 1:1 correlated to the quality and quantity of tokens a billionaire gives you access too (local, sure, they control the hardware markets as well).

Keep excercising your writing and reading muscles because it will definatley set you apart from the captive masses in the future.

Speaking is a culture that has served us well for 300 000 years or so. To note, it has been used for both good and bad..

I honestly think it's more likely that younger generations grow up seeing the ill effects of being AI-pilled for communication/writing, deciding by way of AI literacy that they want none of that, and develop better ideas on responsible use.

I really don't like AI for document writing as a whole, especially within organizations. Code can be a form of communication, but for the most part it's an engineered thing that can be re-run, tested, verified and so on. But documents drive decision-making, and decision making is often one-time. Decisions should be studied and understood, and depriving authors of much of both is not having any good effects.

Chilling.

try speaking from your own perspective instead of assuming a universal one. your opinions, however unhinged, will come off as more genuine.

Oh my god, Socrates was right all along!

As it always should have been. Even Plato/Socrates were intelligent enough to muse about the idea that writing has degraded our memory vs when we had to memorize entire epic poems. They had a lot of hostile stuff to say about writing in Timaeus and other works.

The fact that most teachers refuse to do in-person oral exams has always been due to laziness, incompetence, and the reality of the economics of dealing with classroom sizes where 30 is considered small.

I’m only half joking that someone will come up with a LLM text to speech synthesizer that pauses and plays depending on if your mouth is closed/jaw is moving. Analysizes your voice to synthesize as well.

AI voice synthesis and robots/projectors are a thing. Slop will arrive in the boardrooms and on podiums sooner than many suspect.

In practice this already happens, unfortunately.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI-induced_psychosis

I wouldn't consider that benign but I agree with the characterization, I've come to see the whole AI psychosis thing as a version of sports betting, gacha videogame mechanics or prediction markets. In the US slightly faster than anywhere else pulling the slot machine lever one more time seems to be increasingly become the sole principle of any activity.

Correctness, formal verification, using your own cognitive resources, deterministic results are in many ways actively counter productive to the kind of effect people want to get out of this

Ah, the pearl-clutching woke grifters have arrived.

How many marathons did you run today?

You lost the ‘h’.

Polson - NoSlop

it was right in front of you :)

Nicolas Polson?

Sin: A Slop Colon!

Wiles proof of Fermats last theorem was over 100 pages