tech
January 22, 2026
Science Is Drowning in AI Slop
On a frigid Norwegian afternoon earlier this month, Dan Quintana, a psychology professor at the University of Oslo, decided to stay in and complete a tedious task that he had been putting off for weeks. An editor from a well-known journal in his field had asked him to review a paper that they were considering for publication. It seemed like a straightforward piece of science. Nothing set off any alarm bells, until Quintana looked at the references and saw his own name. The citation of his work looked correct—it contained a plausible title and included authors whom he’d worked with in the past—but the paper it referred to did not exist.
TL;DR
- Academics are encountering "phantom citations" and AI-generated content in scientific papers, indicating widespread issues with academic integrity.
- Large language models are being used to generate plausible-sounding, yet fraudulent or shoddy, research papers at an unprecedented scale.
- "Paper mills" are companies that produce and sell fake scientific papers in large quantities to scientists, often recycling their own materials.
- Fields like cancer research, AI research, and blockchain research are particularly affected by this influx of AI-generated content.
- AI can generate convincing fake images for papers, and even AI models are being used to write peer reviews, sometimes with specific instructions to praise the paper.
- Preprint servers like arXiv are also experiencing a surge in AI-assisted submissions, potentially diluting the signal-to-noise ratio and posing an existential crisis for research dissemination.
- The "dead-internet" theory is invoked as a worst-case scenario, where AI could write and review most papers, leading to a permanent epistemological pollution of knowledge.
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