Asking authors about their own papers

Asking authors about their own papers medium.com

234 points•stefanpie•14 days ago•119 comments•

#authors #asking #papers #asking authors

119 comments

fn-mote11 days ago

The Medium comments on this post are also on point. Running the same experiment with accepted papers is a good control. Running a similar experiment with reviewers would be interesting, but more obnoxious because they are not being paid.

I would keep a private blacklist (shadow ban) the authors who wasted several hours of a reviewer's time to prove they were not legitimate. The existence of such a list would be problematic, though.

Could the same system we use here be applied? Accepted authors could "vouch" for "dead" papers in case they were "auto-killed"?

This system is broken and providing more evidence that it is broken isn't much of a step towards fixing it.

nkrisc11 days ago

It strikes me as akin to plagiarism. If the purported author can’t even answer basic questions about the paper, how can they plausibly claim to have written it?

In the case where someone uses AI to write the paper and then deeply familiarizes themself with it, it may go undetected, but then it’s also presumably less of an issue since they have actually read it carefully and closely. If it’s still bad or wrong after that, then it’s not that different from a human writing a bad or wrong paper on their own and should be treated similarly.

jedbrown11 days ago

Yes. The cognitive process performed by a person using an LLM is often no different from that performed by a person using a ghost author, which is a form of plagiarism covered by 42 CFR § 93.234 - Research misconduct.

Plagiarism, at its most fundamental level, is a lie. It is the taking of works or ideas of others and passing them off as your own, either directly or indirectly. The misdeed itself is in the lie, the “I created this” when it is known to be untrue.

However, that lie isn’t being told to the original victim. It’s a lie about the victim, claiming that they didn’t create it or their contributions didn’t matter, but it’s not a lie to them. Instead, it’s a lie to the audience, which is the second victim and the actual target of the con.

https://www.plagiarismtoday.com/2019/08/01/the-two-victims-o...

CrazyStat11 days ago

> It strikes me as akin to plagiarism. If the purported author can’t even answer basic questions about the paper, how can they plausibly claim to have written it?

Authorship standards differ by field. In biology, for example, it would be common to list someone as an author if they assisted in one experiment. They might be at a different institution and may be unaware of all but the vaguest outline of the paper as a whole—they just got brought onboard because they are an expert in one particular task that needed to be done. In exchange they get to be a middle author (not worth much) and develop a relationship with someone whose expertise they may need on one of their own papers in the future (the primary benefit).

That is not the case here, of course—I just wanted to provide some context for your position not being universally applicable.

phyzome10 days ago

No need to hedge. It very simply is plagiarism.

Lerc11 days ago

> Accepted authors could "vouch" for "dead" papers in case they were "auto-killed"?

The problem isn't with the papers here though, it is the author's understanding of the paper that is in question. A paper written by some hypothetically awesome AI would be a good paper but just not really the proclaimed author's paper.

I think this highlights a dual function of citations that are in tension. A citation can be to claim a stated idea has been made and tested with sufficient rigour to be published. Citation's can also be used to 'credit' others, treating reference as a type of currency. I think this latter form is an outright mistake, but entrenched in academia. The notion of giving credit like this creates a perverse incentive that lies behind much academic fraud, there is enough incentive to be the person to state something that it outweighs the requirement that person has for the statement to be true. Without that notion of credit as currency, issues like plagiarism simply disappear. In the absence of credit, someone making the same claims as someone else without referencing them is just making their own case weaker. Not necessarily less true, but less convincing. If citations were used just used to support a paper then the incentive is to cite, and failing to reference existing work harms only the author.

I think there is too much "This is my idea" and not enough "I think this is true". Credit fails as a measure of effort, diligence, innovation, or truth. Careers are being made and broken by how effectively an individual can game the system.

doc_ick11 days ago

That would fail, humans and agents could create new “author” accounts by the swarm or have paid author accounts.

malfist11 days ago

Do you imagine a world where people are willing to go through the legal hassle of changing their name to get past a ban for low effort journal submissions?

wpietri10 days ago

What's the motivation to do that? Academic fraud is about building up a name.

greenflag11 days ago

One larger problem here is the value of a research paper is rarely the specific knowledge it adds but in the process of researching that adds to the collective knowledge+experience of those involved, especially training graduate students. AI papers shortcut this entirely. Academia has a lot to answer for this too by making papers the currency of success. AI generated papers are almost shortcut learning at a full system level.

PantaloonFlames11 days ago

Jan 2026 https://www.theatlantic.com/science/2026/01/ai-slop-science-...

"For more than a century, scientific journals have been the pipes through which knowledge of the natural world flows into our culture. Now they’re being clogged with AI slop."

Sept 2026 https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/09/college-education-...

Academia, particularly the university system, is an untenable collection of interests. The triple stresses of COVID, AI, and funding withdrawal seem to presage what will be a significant disruption.

doc_ick11 days ago

I disagree for academia using papers as an easy medium for verification and providing more knowledge. Llms always short circuit everything, so how would you fix academia?

syntamono11 days ago

In the same vein, the Symposium on Theory of Computing (STOC) for 2027 has made some interesting changes to its Call For Papers (https://acm-stoc.org/stoc2027/stoc2027-cfp.html), notably requiring that papers be submitted beforehand to a preprint repository and that authors submit a 20-30 minutes video presentation explaining their results.

emil-lp11 days ago

STOC is the premier outlet of theoretical computer science results, so let's hope others follow: FOCS, SODA,...

DataDive10 days ago

What keeps someone from generating this video with AI?

Oranguru10 days ago

AI has not yet reached the point where it can convincingly generate long presentations with the precision required for complex, technical academic topics. It will eventually get there, at which point an additional layer of proof of work will need to be introduced. This is an adversarial race.

I think this is an interesting and effective solution, at least for now. Similarly, graduate and master's theses should focus more on the presentation and on eliciting knowledge from the students through critical, thorough questioning than on the tangible outcome of the project, which can easily and bindly be obtained with AI these days.

c7b11 days ago

> Separately, our group has been exploring approaches along these lines to make such evaluations more scalable

Actually, that sounds like an interesting idea for peer review in general, to include an interview between referees and authors. If it saves one round of rebuttals/reactions, it needn't even consume a lot more of everyone's time if you're doing those things properly. What it would undermine would be blindness, but something's gotta give, and it was already on its way out.

mlmonkey11 days ago

IMHO (not a paper writer, but read a lot during my grad school years), the Genie is out of the bottle. The only way forward, as I see it, is using LLMs for reviews also. Basically, filter all submitted papers with an LLM and ask it to summarize it, find the biggest weaknesses and main strong points, etc. that a human can then use to review the paper. Basically, LLM-as-a-reviewer .

Personally, I would love to see a conference where people are explicitly encouraged to use LLMs for doing the work and writing the papers, and LLMs are used to review them too.

hyperjeff11 days ago

There should at least be a code of professional conduct where authors state the extent to which LLMs were used. (This would also help not wasting time by asking some “authors” about “their” paper.)

Journals themselves should make policies about the extent to which they allow the use of LLMs. In some areas it might be considered more benign than in others.

maleldil11 days ago

There is. NLP conferences, like the ACL family (and the ARR) require you to disclose in the paper if you used LLMs for writing and coding, which ones and how. Whether every author is honest is a different matter.

maleldil11 days ago

This already happens. It's clear when a reviewer used an LLM, and it's very annoying for the authors that have to respond to what are usually low quality, superficial reviews.

mlmonkey11 days ago

Boy do I have news for you! :-D

"low quality, superficial reviews" have always been around. Reviewing is most often an unpaid, thankless job and many times reviewers barely put in the effort.

CrazyStat11 days ago

To be fair, low quality superficial reviews were also not uncommon before LLMs…

amdivia11 days ago

maybe but as a paper writer, the quality of reviews and reviewers have gone down because of LLM-as-a-reviewer too, because LLM reviews seem to regurgitate the limitations section of the paper, and are highly influenced by the way things are phrased in the paper rather than the actual substance.

but I'm hopeful that some middle ground will be found in the future

sgt10110 days ago

I dunno man, I use LLM's to review things before I send them in and I often feel like I've been handcuffed to a chair, had a bright light shone in my face and had to account for all the mistakes I've made in my life.

They can be brutal.

rsfern11 days ago

I think that’s a lot of risk of anchoring reviewer bias. I’d be more comfortable with a triaged review where the editor’s office uses models to score whether a human editor should evaluate a paper to potentially send out for review, then the editor makes their own assessment, and the reviewers continue to do their job unassisted

pwinnski11 days ago

The entire point of an academic paper is to add to the sum of human knowledge. How can an LLM trained on a subset of human knowledge possibly even begin to accurate evaluate such a paper?

I trust an LLM to review that the language used in the paper is grammatically correct, but not to evaluate new information for accuracy.

MikhailTal11 days ago

This is very bad logic

1) Humans also are trained on a subset of human knowledge. 2)A lot of papers are just about experimenting something, and then applying simple stats. Eg empirical studies, around 1/3rd of published papers. Like, we tried this drug or did this experiment, from a sample size X here are the results. An expert is needed to maybe comment on the conclusion/hypothesis of the underlying suspected mechanism, but LLMs are still very useful on catching bad statistics or p hacking (so so common)

zbyforgotp11 days ago

Schmidthuber has an answer: https://arxiv.org/abs/0812.4360

For a more practical approach you need to use proxies: https://zby.github.io/commonplace/articles/what-an-automated...

Read the full thread on Hacker News →

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