Posted by JohnHammersley 14 hours ago
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.
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.
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...
Posted. Having a preprint on arxiv is not publishing.
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
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.
At my institute we for example do not have access to parts of Springer.
Luckily, more and more is moving towards open access.
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 not peer-reviewed and supposed to free and accessible from both sides so the results kind of makes sense.