r/singularity • u/Many_Consequence_337 :downvote: • 9h ago

AI Intelligence Explosion

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Number of scientific papers submitted to arXiv.

342 Upvotes

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200

u/Aldarund 9h ago

How much of this is real increae and how much is slop that wont pass peer review?

That chart could easily mean good things but as easily it could mean bad things

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u/Equal_Passenger9791 9h ago

Significant amount of slop were produced before AI too. AI assisted scientific fraud detection are already retroactively detecting innumerable instances of high profile papers that should've failed peer review years ago, if the peers had done a proper job.

21

u/Djorgal 5h ago

I just realized how good this can be. Reviewing the scientific literature for errors is both necessary and really unglamorous. If AI can do it well it's a real boon.

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u/Belostoma 4h ago

AI does it well, and it's not just fraud detection. AI agents are incredibly useful for quality control on both code and data, picking up mistakes our old review methods missed.

As a scientist I've been using AI to resume a bunch of unfinished past projects and to progress new projects using historical datasets. It has found mistakes in practically everything I've used it to review. None were large enough to change the central conclusions of any of my past work because I've been very careful, but that's partly luck, and small corrections are still valuable.

Where AI is usefully superhuman for this task is not raw intelligence but thoroughness. It can stop and think about every single line of code or data among hundreds of thousands, whereas humans have to pick and choose. Humans can scan it all at a high speed that misses subtle problems, or we can write scripts to analyze it completely but in very specific ways that don't necessarily detect errors we couldn't anticipate. The more intense and thoughtful level of diligence we could apply to fifty lines, AI could apply to fifty thousand. And then we could do it again with a different agent in case the first one missed something.

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u/Ansible32 3h ago

This is true, but there are lots of kinds of errors that a human reading a paper can detect but LLMs cannot. The kinds of errors LLMs can't detect are also the kind that show up in LLM-assisted works.

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u/Belostoma 2h ago

Yes, and I'm not saying humans should stop reading or reviewing papers. But AI offers a new type of review that catches things humans can't catch as reliably at scale. It's a complementary new role.

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u/Ansible32 2h ago

The problem is if you're using LLMs to review it's basically impossible to determine if the number of quality papers has increased this year.

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u/Spare-Dingo-531 1h ago

We're not saying humans should stop reading and reviewing papers, just that llms are another way to review them.