A key science publishing platform is cracking down on AI slop
A key science publishing platform is cracking down on AI slop
https://theconversation.com/a-key-science-publishing-platform-is-cracking-down-on-ai-slop-283136
Publish Date: 2026-05-18 16:08:00
Source Domain: theconversation.com
The pre-print website arXiv has announced that researchers who put their names to papers which included errors clearly generated by artificial intelligence (AI) will face a year-long ban and ongoing restrictions.
The move is a response to a growing influx of AI-generated papers faced by scholarly journals as well as sites such as arXiv, which serve as unofficial platforms for research publication ahead of peer review.
However, not everyone agrees that arXiv’s response to the problem is appropriate – and the solution to the flood of AI slop research may involve more AI, not less.
The rise of bot-assisted writing
AI-generated text is on the rise everywhere. A study released last week suggests half of new articles published online are now “primarily AI-generated”.
Science is not immune to this trend. Last month, the journal Organization Science published a study of how the rise of AI has affected submissions and peer reviews since the release of ChatGPT in 2022. Reporting a dramatic rise in submitted papers and a drop in quality, the authors conclude that “the current state of AI tools, amplified by existing publish-or-perish incentives, appears to be pushing the system toward an equilibrium of more rather than better research”.
A common problem in AI-generated research writing is hallucinated citations: references to other research that does not exist.
The traditional safeguard against poor quality in scholarly publishing is peer review: another expert in the subject at hand reads the research paper and interrogates the work behind it before it can be published.
However, the peer review system was already struggling before AI. Pressured researchers often have little time or incentive to do the unpaid work of peer review.
And on arXiv, which publishes preprints – articles which have most often not been peer-reviewed – even this system is not available. Last year, flooded with AI-generated submissions, the site stopped accepting…
