Posted by stefanpie 3 days ago
EDIT: I found a live link on arxiv https://arxiv.org/html/2609.20481v1
https://chorasimilarity.wordpress.com/2026/06/13/a-captcha-f...
At the moment this was seen as a tongue in cheek proposal.
But it goes even further than their greCAPTCHA and it solves their consumed time problem.
Indeed, in their proposal they have a human bottleneck, but in the june 2026 proposal is suggested that one could use an AI to generate the results without the knowledge of the submitted article.
If the AI can generate a pretty close result, with the article fed gradually as a prompt, then reject.
And even further, that it might be not even a need to publish anymore.
Just use the article for training and make a public database with some numbers about the successful researcher, where we see an influence score (how many times an idea from an accepted article are used by other accepted articles), a publication score (how many articles the author had).
I wonder if the reality will be more or less surprising, my bet is on "more".
The article highlights how only one out of ten paper’s authors were able to answer questions thoroughly and at a high level. This indicates an overwhelming percentage of authors are slopping up their work with AI and submitting it without even reading it.
These days agents are able to really perform genuine experiments and write up the results. A prompt like this: "You'll work autonomously end to end to select a research task that meaningfully advances the state of the art in AI, is clearly defined and worth performing, that people would be interested in reading, and that you can perform on this hardware" (insert details) " in a week. Carefully log your steps so that your results can be replicated. Then, do a research review and write your paper about it up with correct, cited references. You must check all of your citations. Look up current lists of "Claudisms", (such as use of the word "genuinely", or "load-bearing"), and remove them from your writeup. After writing your writeup, edit it and pare it down, remove anything unnecessary, keep it fast paced and interesting. Also, try to tell a story, be engaging in your writeup. Don't use violent metaphors, remove references to killing, strangulation, etc. Your writeup should be ready to publish and accurately reflect a real experiment with a meaningful result that advances the state of the art and contributes to understanding. Be concise and focus on why it matters."
Okay, so there's the prompt. You can give it to any AI and have a journal-ready publication in a week. I guess you can ask it to add charts and stuff, if you want to be fancy.
If I gave my agent the above prompt, would I be one of the authors? Maybe it's fair to say I guided, facilitated, elicited, or advised it. But it's clear that the AI would be the one that is actually selecting and running the experiment and writing up the results.
Someone could probably get a publication without even reading the paper they wrote their name on. Their only contribution might be editing their name into the PDF.
You are not suggesting it, but as some might, I want to emphasize that I think it is, really, really, really bad idea to argue for limiting exposure of the bad practices because the papers may be useful even when not following good practices.
The science can work only when we can trust that the foundation it has been built on, including previous research, is solid.
The trust is partly based on the fact that science is self-correcting. As we know from charge of electron measurements, the existing narrative can work against the self-correction, even when everybody is trying to be as truthful as possible.
My impression is that to a large extend, on many fields, publication numbers (and money) have become so important that self-correction process may have become broken.