I think that university level and other kinds of formal education should be segregated. Universities should host fewer students and being able to provide them with higher rewards for actually meaningful work and I believe that a flood of mediocre quality papers (but let's admit it, in fact they are low quality in their content and perhaps good in their presentation) will lead us to rebuild the education system.

E.g. in the submission form could be a mandatory field “I hereby confirm that I wrote the paper personally.” In conditions there will be a note that violating this rule can lead to temporary or permanent ban of authors. In the world where research success is measured by points in WOS, this could lead to slow down the rise of LLM-generated papers.

Peer review has never really been blind and I suspect PIs will reject papers from "outsiders" even if they are higher quality. This already happens to some extent today when the stakes are lower.

This is showing up (no pun intended) on HN as well. The # of submissions and # of submitters, which traditionally had been surprisingly stable—fluctuating within a fixed range for well over 10 years—has recently been reaching all-time highs. Not double, though...yet.

We should decouple the publishing of papers from academic careers completely. Papers can't generate any reputation or money for the authors anymore. To achieve that, we must anonymize the authors.

All scientists get some (paid) time to write papers — if they want. What they write and if they publish it is not known to anybody. They are trusted to write something of value in that time.

Universities can come up with other ways of judging which professors they hire. Interviews. Test teachings. Or the writing of an non-public application essay, which describes their past research and discoveries.

That is the normal situation, which is the foundation of the progression of civilisation. But some people install incentive systems to sabotage this. They are sabotaging civilisation itself.

I suppose we’re entering TURBO mode for of ‘making many books there is no end’.

Given that arXiv lacks peer review, I'm not clear what quality bar is being referenced here.

That said, it is amazing how terrible a lot of papers are; people are pressured to publish and therefore seem to get into weird ruts trying to do what they think will be published, rather than what is intellectually interesting...

But I really have to remember, we are at the leading edge here. Things take time. There is an opening (generation) and a closing (discernment). Perhaps AI will first generate a huge amount of noise and then whittle it down to the useful signal.

If that view is correct, then this is solid evidence of the amplification of possibility. People will decry the increase of noise, perhaps feeling swamped by it. But the next phase will be separating the wheat from the chaff. It is only in that second phase that we will really know the potential impact.

There have always been content mills, but there was still some cost with producing the low-effort "Top 10" or "Iceberg Examination" videos. Now I will turn on a video about any topic, watch it for three minutes, immediately get a kind of uncanny vibe, and then the AI voice will make a pronunciation mistake (e.g. confusing wind, like the weather effect or the winding of a spring), or the script starts getting redundant or repetitive in ways that are common with AI.

And I suspect these kinds of videos will become more common as time goes on. The cost to producing these videos is getting close to "free" meaning that it doesn't take much to make a profit on them, even if their views are relatively low per-video.

If AI has taught me anything, it's that there still is no substitute for effort. I'm sure AI is used in plenty of places where I don't notice it, because the people who used it still put in effort to make a good product. There are people who don't just make a prompt like "make me a fifteen minute video about Chris Chan" and "generate me a thumbnail with Chris Chan with the caption 'he's gone too far'", and instead will use AI as a tool to make something neat.

Genuine effort is hard, and rare, and these AI videos can give the facsimile of something that prior to 2023 was high effort. I hate it.

what would be a better one?

This kind of pattern is gonna get repeated in a lot of sectors when previous practices that were merely unsustainable become unsustained.

Insofar as most research is awful, it's true that the AI is producing research that looks and sounds like most of it out there today. But common-case research is not what propels society forward. If we try to automate research with the mediocrity machine, we'll just get mediocre research.