It depends on what you’re in it for. This to Marcus’s point/question as well.
There’s various stuff that has triggered something like thoughts, some of which seem to me a little bit constructive, and this list has been the place I would normally want to toss such stuff back and forth. But it can be read as “concerns that come up to an academic”, and I am aware of the rising tide of sentiment (society in general, and not only the MAGAs) that academics all live in a fake world anyway, and the society would be better off if they were all just shoved off into the sea and dispensed with (except the part that maybe businesses feel like hosting and charging a fee for). But what the hell. The early part of last week I lost maybe the more-quality part of two days “reviewing” a submission that I accepted as a “paper”, before realizing it was all slop. Increasingly, that means it wasn’t necessarily wrong. The LLMs now write a lot of equations etc. that are correct. Context is that at least one of the names probably points to a real person, a very junior Chinese expat in a visitor institution of a medical school (that I never heard of, but probably has some repute) in Moscow. How precarious a life would you like to think that is? I don’t know if the second submitter name (also Chinese, but common enough to be widely used) corresponds to an actual person or not. Claim in the manuscript was that it is about multi-neuronal trajectories during mesoscale brain-state changes (say, learning, making a choice, etc.) The only other paper by the same submitter name is on Kerr black holes. Not published, just stuff at researchgate and the earlier author on the other one gave a talk somewhere. Anyway, once I switched the necker cube to realizing it was all slop, it was of course overwhelming that it was so. After looking at it in that frame for a bit, I concluded that there is a good likelihood that no actual person did any actual work at all. Probably the submitter asked one of the LLMs to choose something that would sound like a project, to go do a Gish gallop through literature that could be padded into an “introduction”, though none of it was ever used for anything, put in a bunch of platitudes about the valid interpretation of different methods (also never used or revisited again in any way) maybe to write some code (which maybe the person ran or maybe not), generate some figures that purport to be the output of those simulations (which, for various technical features I strongly doubt; I think they were made up), and then package it all into a “paper” that the submitter could submit. There were large sections in it that were in a somewhat obscure area, which read like plagiarism of our work in that area (my way of saying things is non-standard enough that plagiarism of me doesn’t sound like plagiarism of most larger communities, and I know parts of the math community who work in this area, and don’t sound like that us at all), but since _nobody at all_ was cited in that section, of course I have no way to know. The submitter probably doesn’t even know what the community is, as the LLM maybe never gave her any of that information. It just, oracular-like, plunked down various sentences and equation forms. On the other hand, this is a journal I never heard of and that never heard of me, so I expect the reason I was asked to review is that the LLM suggested us as potential reviewers as one of its prompt replies. Fun note: I explained all this to the handling editor (and the parts that don’t involve my own identity to the submitter as well, since I don’t feel like coming under harassment by a troll farm, if this is not just the desperate action of one kid trying to survive). This is a Springer journal, and a colleague shared the opinion a while back that Springer, despite having some legacy good titles, has degenerated to being nearly a predatory publisher. The “editor”’s response to my review and others was “Revise”. Anyway, what are the three thoughts (sorry for that long preamble) following from any of this? 1. Academics give lip service to, but I’m not sure they have embodied in the gut, the absolute tsunami of sewage that they are all about to get submerged under. They may come to wish they had been shoved into the sea. 2. Why did I waste nearly 2 days before realizing what all this was? This matters to me, because it speaks to how awful academic writing has been forever. The Gish gallops, the padding, the oracular style? It’s always a goddamned cryptology exercise, trying to figure out what the hell something means, or how a claimed result was arrived at. Sometimes it’s because the authors are geniuses; don’t know what to do about them, because they genuinely can’t understand why things need to be explained for other people to follow them. Sometimes it’s because the authors are lazy, and don’t feel like explaining well if they think they got something right. Most of the time it’s probably hazing, by authors who want to look impressive by making things harder for the reader to get than they need to be. (For a large part of this, I blame Bourbaki, which Persi Diaconis — blessings be upon him — gave me permission to do despite my being a mere physicist. Bourbaki were like the Grover Norquists of math. They had two purity tests: Always remember that: 1) any message from a sufficiently advanced society will be indistinguishable from magic to a lesser society; and 2) any maximally compressed message will be indistinguishable from a random string of bits. Mathematicians must always test their written output against these two criteria and try to maximize both. This umbrella then gives cover for lots of bad writing that is actually done for other reasons, along with the inevitable difficulties of specialization and siloing.) It can take me anywhere from weeks to forever to understand a single paper. If review is supposed to mean notarizing that the contents of a paper are correct, and I get three new requests a week, clearly those times don’t scale. So inevitably, getting as close as I can, and admitting where I am still stumped, I give writers the benefit of the doubt, that some very costly figure that I have no possible way to reproduce (outcome of years of work in some specialist lab) is what they claim. In the age of slop, I don’t give anybody the benefit of the doubt. But that means the review timescale expands back to its authentic self, which is weeks to years (or maybe forever) for each paper. The number of things we will have lost, in a society where trust is no longer possible, toward anybody in regard to anything, is so large that I don’t think anybody is seriously reckoning with it. 3. But then, what to do? My thought was that we (what “we”?) should create a new journal. ONE new journal only. It’s called “Vibe Science”. All the submissions will be auto-generated by LLMs. If people want to serve them by feeding prompts, that’s fine too. Kind of Matrix-like (or 3rd-world porn-flagging exploitation-like) jobs people already take. A new gig-subeconomy. Maybe they can be fed a meal a day in payment. Then LLMs can also do all the reviewing, and can send messages to each other (or maybe there is only one LLM at the end; does it even use messages any more?). They/it can decide what is good and should be accepted, and what should not be accepted. Why not? There’s no reason to have more than one journal, since internally the LLMs can sort what is “in” or “across” any discipline or disciplines, and to invent new typologies as needed for their internal indexing. People can’t read it anyway, so there is no reason to make it human-indexing-friendly (or maybe even tractable). Then the accepted stuff can all be archived somewhere, on more Mongolian rare earths with fossil- or nuclear-powered cooling towers and fans. What will we do with it? I guess people with no other survival work, like the e-waste-recyclers in India or the Philippines, can trawl through the lists of claims, and see if there is anything the human world would like to regard as “true” or “potentially useful” or (here, for the unemployed artists) “interesting”. Maybe that will become what PhD training aims toward. Now of course, there isn’t any reason the data-trove can’t just be made self-activating in the world of physical robots, so I’m not sure what the vetting by the recyclers would unpack to. But maybe some decision-maker somewhere uses that. Something along this line is my guess at the set of things that will have to be chosen and decided, in a quite near term, but quite a number of people. Or maybe decided by 10 people, and everybody else can scramble and see if there is a survival trajectory through the new wreckage. At the end of all this, though, I think it pushes us to front something we should always have been thinking about, but have had the luxury of not thinking much about before now. There were good uses for calculators, and even though it deprived some people of the ability to do fast addition in-head, we continue to do math, with new frontiers possible. There will be some version of that for the LLMs as interface, and much more general AI tools for empirical results and their representations. But then what is a system for thinking through what a person can want, or might want, as a participant in the order that results? The sort of emotive tropes that seem popular now, or the online gurus of everything, kind of leave me unimpressed. All this common-language and lore and culture that we have as hand-me-down from time immemorial is what came through the filters of people’s needs to reason out these things, in the circumstances of the times. To the extent that those circumstances are going to be different — not clear to me, since ecological collapse and mobs of the dispossessed could just thump it all into rubble — a different version of something similarly filtered will need to come about somehow. Back to the opening question: For myself, I would not have wanted to be one of the people prompting the LLM to invent a question and write a bunch of junk that I could send to a Springer journal. I certainly do not envy her life as a junior Chinese expat in a cordoned-off sub-institute in Moscow. Less dangerous and demanding of wits to try to become a gang leader. Even though I suspect some of those people have talent, and many of them I would like and appreciate if I knew them. I still take weeks or months fiddling with some annoying thing to see if a certain kind of field theory can be coherently defined into existence, and whether it gets the answer to some empirical question about rare statistics right. I guess, the fact that that is what I want to do, and that it sometimes might also get something empirically right, is why the society increasingly wants to dump the academics. But it still is what I have accepted paycuts and spontaneous/episodic unemployment, and various other nuisances, to somehow put aside time to continue doing. Eric > On Aug 2, 2026, at 6:49, glen <[email protected]> wrote: > > I had similar thoughts. It's cool and all. But I can't help but wonder why > they did NOT use more AI. > > On 7/31/26 9:44 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote: >> 2607.17397 is a weird one. The true believers among us might wonder why >> they are still working on their papers at all. >> -----Original Message----- >> From: Friam <[email protected]> On Behalf Of glen >> Sent: Friday, July 31, 2026 10:19 AM >> To: [email protected] >> Subject: [FRIAM] cognitive offloading >> As preamble: >> 1) Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs >> https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fblog.codeberg.org%2fprotecting-our-floss-commons-from-llms.html&c=E,1,PSzw3UoOT3SOXSaXTGDk-zPlNdIkPx58sbCqKgH3fqrZLLmTvR9c1q0G-qeL_GFsAE-9sNkr7RvNRtkbG756llp3STEvrsBt9Ztbt3W424zCKnZWhQ,,&typo=1 >> 2) Science Direct Summary >> https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fwww.sciencedirect.com%2fscience%2farticle%2fabs%2fpii%2fS1364661316300985&c=E,1,Rez0hef2TLaMMg2jA_kk6d6KHVgSHZk75ETTunCX7Dt5GuSi33eko0ka8iSoiXEajFB0XSerQBNPvL3p8DqGXHdWrysTvUyNzne192tlWA,,&typo=1 >> But this is the main driver for this post: >> 3) The unintended consequences of large language models as a >> labor-augmenting technology in science >> https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.17397 >> I think the Codeberg hypothesis (and stance) about one-off code provides a >> clear foil for disambiguating what code/software actually *is*. There's a >> difference between collaboratively developed code and "interpretable" >> methods. It seems like 2 subtly different meanings of the word "open". >> Codeberg is (effectively, if not purposefully) saying they are not a >> "repository" in the sense of, say, >> https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2fvivli.org%2f&c=E,1,dWHhPQRYDujbxzdX0_0zLPwURhJoU16RdDayBZS4TaF5bo89ZIRV6_Aqm3S_pPkFx_myz98EbKiCplE-Ezjz7tKrBm_ewCfGM8kSONgRrH3KjA7nZ8nPNzYo&typo=1. >> Now, I'm a fan of opinionated tech. But Codeberg's stance seems a bit >> reactionary to me. I mean, it's fine. It's their site, their hardware, etc. >> So I'm not objecting ... simply processing. >> But if we move on to Duede et al (3), the paper irritates me because I like >> to believe I have an empirical bent. I'm having trouble formulating their >> model such that its premises are backed by data and that it makes testable >> predictions. It's my problem, I'm sure. But even in the abstract, they say >> "researchers will become more selective about what they publish". I feel >> like they should have prefaced that with "if our model validates" or >> "analysis of our model argues that" ... or somesuch. IDk. Inside the paper, >> their assertions are softer and more palatable ... but they still seem to be >> reifying. >> I've included (2) because, from my perspective the LLMs are a fairly >> straightforward advancement in the lineage of the pencil, or the printing >> press, or the internet. We imbue our talisman(s) with our hopes and fears, >> then ratchet our thinking up and never look back (until someone slips a hero >> dose of LSD into our drink at the party). A large proportion of us will be >> catastrophically damaged if our ratcheted scaffolds collapse. (Some >> scaffolds are so robust no amount of truth or fact will collapse it at all.) >> But at least some subset of dorks will always be fascinated by little >> details like manually selected fonts or assessing whether some modeling >> assumption is *actual* as opposed to convenient. We're each free to offload >> whichever homunculus we find irritating. 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