So a professor at a major institution wrote 200 papers last year. Unlike other commenters I’ve observed so fare, I think this is neither true research nor pure AI fraud. It is likely AI slop to varying degrees, but like a lot of slop it’s not that there is likely nothing of value within it, but rather that it hasn’t been vetted, investigate, or curated by the author in a meaningful way. So what is it? The tell is the lack of submission to peer review. It’s intellectual squatting. It’s dumping a series of haystacks on the plains and laying claim to each of the needles probabilistically within each.
Imagine you are a person who has highly esoteric, potentially important ideas every day. Many of those ideas you suspect, based on some combination of experience and ego, are new in at least one dimension. You would like to get credit for that newness. For being first. What’s the problem?
The problem is that scholarship remains more perspiration than inspiration. Having a new idea is great, but it takes years to work through the nuance in sufficient detail that you can convince your peers of the coherence and originality of the contribution. During the minutes each day you are not working on this singular project you have the inspiration for other ideas, sometimes multiple within a single day. How frustrating is the proposition that someone else gets credit for the originality of contribution just because they had time to reveal it to the world while you were embroiled in your investigation of what is only one of your many score ideas!?
Ah, but meta-level inspiration has struck you! What if you took each one of those ideas, spent an hour curating a series of prompts around it, and then let Chat GPT or another LLM fabricate any entire research paper around it? It might not be good, correct, or even coherent, but it does somethine far more important. It establishes an intellectual property right to the claim of being first. Now, to be clear, you are fully aware of the deficiciency of your paper as an actual scholarly contribution, but if somone else writes a full paper you at least have something to point to and say “I was here first. Cite me. Hell, if I’m close enough you might even have to name it after me. Well, sure, us. But definitely include me. Glory shared via hypenhnation is better than no glory at all.”
Is it a contribution? Not really. The work isn’t there. It’s like plopping down a block of marble with a dramatic-ish sketch of a man on an adhered post-it note and claiming that Michaelangelo needs to share credit with you on any subsequent sculptures. It’s like asking people to cite that one cool tweet you did about how DNA is cool but maybe RNA could be useful in vaccines one day. But it serves the ego and legacy, if not in quality, then at least in volume.
BTW, I’m not 100% sure this isn’t an AI take on a modern Sokal hoax. An attempt to show how much AI slop is introducing a whole new version of Gresham’s Law to scholarship. But if we treat it as earnest, it’s proof that a very smart person can potentially disrupt the market for scholarship by laying claim to ideas in much the same way that the printing press undermined the market for plenary indulges. Flood the market, leave it to someone else to sort through the ecumenical consequences.
Economist Writing Every Day 