@peterbhase: I feel quite sad from doing my ICLR reviews today. It appears that the grim reaper of AI has come for scientific publis…

I feel quite sad from doing my ICLR reviews today. It appears that the grim reaper of AI has come for scientific publishing. One paper was just desk rejected after I wrote a constructive review for it last week. The next two I had to give 1s. The fourth paper I recommended desk rejection, and the last I would reject for plagiarism, but the truth is that I don’t know if a human could attest to the writing. Please, please try to address this problem, future PCs. The ship has sailed for ICLR 2027, but after this, we will need something to change. Without a healthy peer review system, students are not exposed to unfiltered criticism of their work. This kind of criticism is essential for improving as a scientist, and it is a rising tide that lifts up the whole scientific community. We can’t abandon the system entirely. In order to be incentivized to engage with the system, reviewers either need payment or to be given work that is not complete drudgery to try to read. If reviewers disengage with the system or shirk their labor, as I very much want to do right now, this will lead to a death spiral where authors do not expect to receive fair reviews and reviewers do not expect to review genuine work. I wish there were promising solutions to this problem that did not involve increasing the deadweight loss associated with paper submission, such as requiring videos with submissions or submission fees. But the cost of submission in real terms has gone down, and we will need to artificially raise it in order to even begin to cope with the surge in demand for AI publications. There’s also the “burn it all down” solution, but I find it hard to imagine what that would end in besides reinventing the current system.