hckrnws
ArXiv receives multiyear commitments to support it as an independent nonprofit
(blog.arxiv.org)
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by JohnHammersley
by JohnHammersley
It’s ironic that the LLMs which benefit so much from reading arXiv papers of yore are now being used to pollute it. Personally if I see a single author post 2023, I assume it’s junk, especially if they’re not from an actual research institution. Not all solo independent researchers are phonies but … many phonies are solo independent researchers.
OpenReview is okay but even some of the reviewers are apparently using LLMs or just hardly reading.
There now so many researcher that need to publish which explains the flooding, LLM only speed it up, so reciprocal reviews take place. So now you are forced to review and you are having less and less time. So it’s a natural choice for you if you already took an LLM to write a paper to use it to review.
Perhaps one solution would be much harder entry barriers, and enforcing some guidelines. For example that a supervisor can not have more than 5 papers and PhD students only need one real paper on a major conference/journal.
Unless you are working in the area of the paper AND know the reputation of the authors AND take a deep look, just give it the same credibility than to a random PDF posted in WordPress. They have some weak filtering because to post in the arXiv someone must vouch for you or something similar, but it's a very weak filter and people was already abusing it.
And then the AI slop truck hit...
What an interesting problem to have!
So, let's see, we have a hosting site, much like GitHub is for code, or DropBox is for files, or Pastebin is for text, or YouTube is for Videos, except that this website is tailored to hosting academic papers as opposed to other specific file types...
Now in 2026 we have a problem, and that is that AI (or people using AI) are apparently writing crappy AI-written academic papers, and uploading them to ArXiv (and other academic paper hosting sites) in large amounts...
What to do, what to do?
Hmmm, this sounds very similar to the problem of many crappy AI-generated videos being uploaded to YouTube...
Or, the "AI-generated-file-of-specific-type-was-uploaded-where-the-file-contents-of-uploaded-files-of-that-type-are-NOT-supposed-to-be-AI-generated-on-this-specific-file-type-hosting-website" problem...
What to do, what to do?
Well, heck, I don't know!
What shall we all do?!?!?!?!?!?
Observation (if I might!): The "people using AI to upload crap to the Internet" problem is a subset of the (older, larger!) "people just plain uploading crap to the Internet" pre-AI problem... :-)
>"Lots of suggestions in the comments but no magic bullets."
This is Hacker News after all; what were you expecting? Silence? :-)
I remember in the early days of PGP this was put forward as a vision. I remember the various key-holding systems (that were hard to use). I did a key-party with my brother and his friend in the '90s.
Why did this fail?
How is science to evolve if good research requires $49 a pop to view?
And what amazes me is that these authors have undeniably stood on the shoulders of giants in order to create their research.
ArXiv gives the appearance of scientific credibility that a blog post wouldn't have so I'm seeing the platform get abused.
> ArXiv gives the appearance of scientific credibility that a blog post wouldn't have
That's an error on your side not theirs
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More to your question, I recommend something like semanticscholar to find actual relevant papers. Try to identify researchers that seem trustworthy, then explore the citation network around them.
For more hot off the press stuff, follow what gets boosted on social media.
Still doesn’t cover the truly niche stuff but it’s a start
It’s the same type of people that would have no issue letting an LLM open a pull request on GitHub wasting valuable time of other humans, and whatnot.
I’m using LLMs all the time myself, but it’s so incredibly important to use it to improve the quality of your work, not degrade it. People seem to be totally oblivious about this.
On the flip side, it does make it easier to recognize people who are wasting my time.
This is not always the psychological situation, but I think it might be a lot of the time.
I also think that until we recognize this, we won't be able to help people to not do it. Calling them lazy or being bewildered by them or feeling rage or contempt towards them or threatening them is not going to be practically helpful.
To clarify: for a large number of topic I find this completely fair and valuable to first have to build trust. But getting your research paper in front of other humans on a aggregation website seems like the one place where this for me falls apart.
Today any one from any corner of the world from any educational or non education place publish stuff, well moderation is tight and often it won't get through but I know a few friends who aren't in academia that have a paper up there who wouldn't have been as easily able to get a paper on anywhere else.
Maybe that's not a genuine concern but that often used to be the case and still is in a lot of invite first clubs/groups. I know credible people in the field who were and are working in relative isolation which leads to not being able to participate in sharing of ideas.
At my institute we for example do not have access to parts of Springer.
Luckily, more and more is moving towards open access.
This kind of criticism is misplaced. The answer to reputable journals being held hostage by the likes of Elsevier is not dropping peer review and dump articles in a blog-like site such as Arxiv.
I'm confident the bulk of academia would love to move away from Elsevier et al and have free open journals as their discourse venue. However, the publish or perish situation created pressure to count only the papers published in reference publications in their productivity metrics, and those were hijacked by for-profit editorial companies which unscrupulously abuse their dominant entrenched position.
And publishing on Arxiv does not change that.
Posted. Having a preprint on arxiv is not publishing.
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Arxiv is a blog. Your paper is a blog post which is just as citable and as peer reviewed as blogspot.
I don't think you fully understand the problem. It doesn't matter if you can find in arxiv a preprint of an article published on a reputable journal. What matters is that right besides that paper you will find a dozen other papers that can be utter nonsense generated by a poorly calibrated slop factory. You don't find those in papers published in respectable journals which enforce double blind peer review and were filtered for relevance and quality.
It's that peer review process that creates value and relevance. Otherwise all you have is a glorified file server.
It's not peer-reviewed and supposed to free and accessible from both sides so the results kind of makes sense.