My long 2021 post "'The Degenerative Spiral of 'Grand Explanation' Academia" was one that painted a troubling portrait of malfunction and deceit in the world of academic researchers purporting to have grand explanations for great mysteries of nature. Has there been improvement since that time? To the contrary, things seems to be getting worse. As Exhibit A to back up the claim that the generative spiral of "grand explanation" academia is worsening, I may offer a recent article by Ross Andersen in The Atlantic, one entitled, "Science Is Drowning in AI Slop." We read this, referring to the "large-language models" used by so-called artificial intelligence or AI:
"Almost immediately after large language models went mainstream, manuscripts started pouring into [scientific] journal inboxes in unprecedented numbers. Some portion of this effect can be chalked up to AI’s ability to juice productivity, especially among non-English-speaking scientists who need help presenting their research. But ChatGPT and its ilk are also being used to give fraudulent or shoddy work a new veneer of plausibility, according to Mandy Hill, the managing director of academic publishing at Cambridge University Press & Assessment. That makes the task of sorting wheat from chaff much more time-consuming for editors and referees, and also more technically difficult."
We read about companies called paper mills that help scientists produce papers, either by generating from scratch a fake paper, or by generating dubious or fake paragraphs or dubious or fake images that a scientist can use in his paper. AI makes it much easier for such science fakery to occur. These paper mill companies don't have advertisements with phrases such as "We'll Help You Fake Things!" Instead, they claim to offer "editorial services" or maybe "creative consulting" or "literary facilitation" or some other euphemism.
It seems that many scientists use such "paper mills" to speed up the job of producing a scientific paper, in a shady way similar to a football player taking banned steroids to boost his performance. But with all the AI tools out there, such as ChatGPT, it seems that a scientist does not even have to become involved with external paper mills. Similar results can be achieved from a scientist's desktop, when he uses some AI tool such as ChatGPT.
We read that AI tools are also being used to write peer reviews. The article says, "Pangram Labs recently analyzed thousands of peer reviews that were submitted to ICLR, and found that more than half of them were written with help from an LLM, and about a fifth of them were wholly AI-generated." We read this: "AI science slop has spread beyond the journals now, and is also overrunning other venues for disseminating research."
Preprint servers are sites such as the Cornell physics paper server and the biology preprint server Biorxiv. Andersen states this:
"But in the months after ChatGPT was released, preprint servers experienced the same spike in submissions that journals did. Ginsparg, who is now a professor of information science at Cornell, told me he hoped that this would be a short-lived trend, but the rate of submissions continues to rise. .. A similar influx of AI-assisted submissions has hit bioRxiv and medRxiv, the preprint servers for biology and medicine. Richard Sever, the chief science and strategy officer at the nonprofit organization that runs them, told me that in 2024 and 2025, he saw examples of researchers who had never once submitted a paper sending in 50 in a year."
Andersen ends on this gloomy note, describing the most severe degenerative spiral of the scientific literature:
"When I called A. J. Boston, a professor at Murray State University who has written about this issue, he asked me if I’d heard of the dead-internet conspiracy theory. Its adherents believe that on social media and in other online spaces, only a few real people create posts, comments, and images. The rest are generated and amplified by competing networks of bots. Boston said that in the worst-case scenario, the scientific literature might come to look something like that. AIs would write most papers, and review most of them, too. This empty back-and-forth would be used to train newer AI models. Fraudulent images and phantom citations would embed themselves deeper and deeper in our systems of knowledge. They’d become a permanent epistemological pollution that could never be filtered out."
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