Artificial intelligence researchers hit by flood of ‘slop’
Conferences restrict use of LLMs after surge of low-quality AI-generated papers and reviews

Artificial intelligence researchers are grappling with a problem core to their field: how to stop so-called “AI slop” from damaging confidence in the industry’s scientific work. AI conferences have rushed to restrict the use of large language models for writing and reviewing papers in recent months after being flooded with a wave of poor AI-written content.

Scientists have warned that the surge of low-quality AI-generated material risks eroding trust and the integrity of the sector’s research by introducing false claims and made-up content.

“There is a little bit of irony to the fact that there’s so much enthusiasm for AI shaping other fields when, in reality, our field has gone through this chaotic experience because of the widespread use of AI,” said Inioluwa Deborah Raji, an AI researcher at the University of California, Berkeley. . . . In January AI detection start-up GPTZero published research that found there were over 100 AI-generated errors across 50 papers last year at the Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS) conference, considered the most prestigious place to publish cutting-edge AI research.

Further down the article is "A tell-tale sign is when papers contain hallucinated references in the bibliography, or figures that are wrong, said Dietterich. These users are then banned from submitting papers to arXiv for a while, he added."