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Top-level LLM poasting. You have my seal of approval.
IQ scored are renormalized regularly, so in a society that did do that, the median IQ would be 100 again (though they would be far higher on previous scales, this is a minor nitpick, I'm in the mood for those)
One obvious answer would be that the LLMs have become good enough that accepting their output, in a research setting, actually does achieve the objective of creating and promulgating useful knowledge.
I don't think we're there quite yet, but it's a sign we're close if so many are leaking through the cracks in the hallowed peer review process. You almost certainly couldn't achieve that with GPT-2, it would be too incoherent, unless you went with absolute bottom-barrel pay to publish journals, whereas they're cropping up in modestly respectable ones and even the odd prestigious journal.
People, including scientists, have always been lazy to some degree. That usually manifested as having grad students or even undergrads doing the grunt work. Now we've got new avenues.
Besides, as far as I'm concerned, we're only a few years away from LLMs doing "legitimate" research, and then becoming outright superhuman. This is just a transitional stage to get there, we have to deal with ersatz good enough to fool checked out reviewers section for only a bit longer. And soon enough we'll have the journals using AI themselves to notice and filter out the crap.
I think these cases demonstrate the "peer review process" is not and was not working very well in the first place, and to the extent it was working, it was because of the remaining scraps of integrity among people writing and submitting manuscripts. Thus the reviewers didn't have to do much serious reviewing, like reading all of the manuscript and thinking about it.
I agree peer review is a flawed idea applied terribly.
The incentive structure simply makes no sense. Busy academics are expected to do a great deal of work and cognitive effort in return for little to no recognition or recompense. It's a testament to natural honesty that it sometimes works even in a subpar manner.
Unless you actively incentivize things like performing replications, it's all for naught. We wouldn't have a replication crisis in the softer sciences if that wasn't the case. At least it's more obvious in the harder ones when something plainly does not work.
It needs to be torn down and rebuilt, but easier said than done for such a loadbearing structure in Science™.
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