> “An Interdisciplinary Synthesis Across Economics, Psychology, Biology, Philosophy, Game Theory, and Spiritual Tradition.”
If one were inclined, they could shorten the title to "AI Synthesis Across Economics, Psychology, Biology, Philosophy, Game Theory, and Spiritual Tradition." Maybe that's an Easter egg.
AI submissions, soon AI reviewers, and shortly after only AI readers.
The guy's name is "nosloP" spelled backwards. Maybe spelled normally it's supposed to signify the opposite.
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.
I went to a "town hall" at my company last friday, the slides were all obviously AI-generated, the text was too, without anybody proofreading it.
How do i know? Because i doubt "Access&Identity will help us push forward the productivity of all collaborators" was what the team responsible for the prompt wanted to say.
IIUC there are not 258 academic papers published in serious peer review journals [1], only 258 "preprints" in a free preprint server. It's like posting in WordPress but using a PDF instead of html [2]. I guess they start with "abstract" and end with "References" so they looks like papers.
For some weird reason in the last few years people forgot the differences and now any PDF is an "academic paper" [3]. (I'd be more annoyed, if the internal system of the university also forgot the difference. I'm afraid to ask.)
[1] Whatever "serious" means, that's a huge can of worms.
[2] They get an doi and a version number in case of a change.
Vadim Sokolov, the co-author of the paper mentioned in the post defends this insane practice and says they reviewed at least one of the 258 generated papers with their own eyes, they are thus not fake papers. Completely deranged behavior.
Why would someone ruin their academic credentials and reputation (at a reputable university) like this? Maybe there was nothing to begin with? Otherwise I can't understand this.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I'm not an academic, and I understand by osmosis that organized science has many problems related to publishing and connected mechanisms, but I have to say there's been quite a few moments in my life and career when I found the inspiration or solution I needed in a good paper.
For condensed knowledge on highly specific topics (i.e. more specific than is economical in book form) I often know nothing better.
Most recently I did sort of a self-taught crash course in ground-penetrating radar and applications for an archeological endeavour I write software for, and a number of papers have been really invaluable.
I think one of the end-game components for AI is to be able to read all the literature and generate a reliable list of which ones are not correct and a convincing reason why.
> generate a reliable list of which ones are not correct and a convincing reason why
That is not realistic, but I suppose where things are heading is that you have some indicator of the strength of evidence -- see Fig. 13 in the following insightful take:
Though, "strength" should probably be "reliability" and "validity", and I suppose those indicators are more for picking signals from the noise; i.e., what is even worth clicking and reading. That would be increasingly valuable already today due to the volume (and, yes, slop and other related stuff).
I've tried here and there, but even the top-end models always tend toward shallow generalist takes. I've not been able to get more than basic primers out of LLMs, and nothing close to the ability of a professional author to stay on course with an idea, detail level, specificity etc. of a good human-authored paper.
People in the early days used to often whine that LLMs just regurgitate text snippets (unfounded of course), but I think the way we currently train and RLHF them actually seems to largely make them unable to reproduce the knowledge they have been trained on, since they seem to just always want to please the mean with their output. I'm oversimplifying the mechanisms, but you get my drift.
Alan Sokal style hoax is what comes to mind first, of course. Wouldn't be the first computer-generated hoax either (see SCIgen). However see also the P.P.P.P.S. in the article, his co-author denies that in the comments.
Writing is a technology that served us well for over 5000 years, but now times are a changing. Written media will cease to provide any value in the next decade i think. In person chats/Public speaking will be revered again.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I tried writing a simple 20 page paper with the latest Claude model over several weeks and that thing got ripped apart by legal and data science (for good reason), not going to try that again. And there I had all the numbers and analyses down and verified, just the writing itself by Claude was subpar.
Can’t imagine the utter garbage that Claude will produce when you give it a simple prompt and let it write thousand of pages.
Kind of makes me wonder about all that AGI talk if these models can’t even the work of a good PhD or postdoctoral student.
Years ago I was an academic peer reviewer and hated it, you've probably seen published work thats low in quality - you wouldn't believe how low quality the unpublished crap is. I cannot even imagine the absolute bundle of garbage that must be handled by these unpaid reviewers today. We need a better system.
Another possible answer to the "What's in it for him?" question:
The Everest effect.
George Mallory: "The first question you will ask, and the one I have to answer is, 'What's the point of climbing Mount Everest?' And my answer should be, 'It's no use.' There is not the slightest prospect of any gain. Oh, maybe we can learn a little about the behavior of the human body at height, and medicine can change our observations for aviation purposes. But nothing else could come of it. We will not bring back a little gold or silver or gemstones or coal or iron. We will not find soil or earth that we can grow crops that produce food. There is no point. So if you can't understand that there's something in humans that responds to the challenges of this mountain and goes to meet those challenges, then the struggle that ensues is a struggle from life itself upwards, and you won't see why we're leaving. What we get from this adventure is just joy. We don't live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to enjoy life. That is the meaning of life and the purpose of living."
Why generate all of these papers? Because, for the first time, he can.
Doesn't have to be for the money or fame or potential for speaking engagements. It could simply be that he wants to test the limits of what's possible.
Squatting seems like the most plausible explanation. Explaining an idea to your friend at a bar doesn't make it "yours", but publishing a manuscript does.
If one were inclined, they could shorten the title to "AI Synthesis Across Economics, Psychology, Biology, Philosophy, Game Theory, and Spiritual Tradition." Maybe that's an Easter egg.
AI submissions, soon AI reviewers, and shortly after only AI readers.
The guy's name is "nosloP" spelled backwards. Maybe spelled normally it's supposed to signify the opposite.
Most insightful comment
It isn't even partially human written, it's just an LLM's output.
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.
How do i know? Because i doubt "Access&Identity will help us push forward the productivity of all collaborators" was what the team responsible for the prompt wanted to say.
For some weird reason in the last few years people forgot the differences and now any PDF is an "academic paper" [3]. (I'd be more annoyed, if the internal system of the university also forgot the difference. I'm afraid to ask.)
[1] Whatever "serious" means, that's a huge can of worms.
[2] They get an doi and a version number in case of a change.
[3] A few years ago they were call "whitepapers".
Source: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/08/27/258/#comme...
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.
Oh also at least 40% generated peer-reviews are contributing to this statistic.
For condensed knowledge on highly specific topics (i.e. more specific than is economical in book form) I often know nothing better.
Most recently I did sort of a self-taught crash course in ground-penetrating radar and applications for an archeological endeavour I write software for, and a number of papers have been really invaluable.
That is not realistic, but I suppose where things are heading is that you have some indicator of the strength of evidence -- see Fig. 13 in the following insightful take:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49407226
Though, "strength" should probably be "reliability" and "validity", and I suppose those indicators are more for picking signals from the noise; i.e., what is even worth clicking and reading. That would be increasingly valuable already today due to the volume (and, yes, slop and other related stuff).
People in the early days used to often whine that LLMs just regurgitate text snippets (unfounded of course), but I think the way we currently train and RLHF them actually seems to largely make them unable to reproduce the knowledge they have been trained on, since they seem to just always want to please the mean with their output. I'm oversimplifying the mechanisms, but you get my drift.
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...
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.
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.
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.
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.
Perhaps this will help bring more scrutiny to the metric of publishing quantity not being as valuable as it has been treated.
If you only knew.
Can’t imagine the utter garbage that Claude will produce when you give it a simple prompt and let it write thousand of pages.
Kind of makes me wonder about all that AGI talk if these models can’t even the work of a good PhD or postdoctoral student.
(For instance, 58 pages, 80 pages ... I don't think of these as normal academic length if this is the main body content ...)
The Everest effect.
George Mallory: "The first question you will ask, and the one I have to answer is, 'What's the point of climbing Mount Everest?' And my answer should be, 'It's no use.' There is not the slightest prospect of any gain. Oh, maybe we can learn a little about the behavior of the human body at height, and medicine can change our observations for aviation purposes. But nothing else could come of it. We will not bring back a little gold or silver or gemstones or coal or iron. We will not find soil or earth that we can grow crops that produce food. There is no point. So if you can't understand that there's something in humans that responds to the challenges of this mountain and goes to meet those challenges, then the struggle that ensues is a struggle from life itself upwards, and you won't see why we're leaving. What we get from this adventure is just joy. We don't live to eat and make money. We eat and make money to enjoy life. That is the meaning of life and the purpose of living."
Why generate all of these papers? Because, for the first time, he can.
Doesn't have to be for the money or fame or potential for speaking engagements. It could simply be that he wants to test the limits of what's possible.
0. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=170...
1. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=228...
2. https://www.chicagobooth.edu/faculty/directory/p/nicholas-po...
it was right in front of you :)
Sin: A Slop Colon!