Comment by efitz

LLMs are tools that make it easier to hack incentives, but you still need a person to decide that they'll use an LLM t do so.

Blaming LLMs is unproductive. They are not going anywhere (especially since open source LLMs are so good.)

If we want to achieve real change, we need to accept that they exist, understand how that changes the scientific landscape and our options to go from here.

LLMs are not people. We can’t blame them.

What would be the point of blaming LLMs? What would that accomplish? What does it even mean to blame LLMs?

LLMs are not submitting these papers on their own, people are. As far as I'm concerned, whatever blame exists rests on those people and the system that rewards them.

This was a problem before LLMs and it would remain a problem if you could magically make all of them disappear.

LLMs are not the root of the problem here.

I blame keyboards, without them there wouldn't be these problems.

I don't really buy it. Are we to believe they go out of their way to keep people homeless? Does the same logic apply to doctors keeping people sick?

It's a metric attribution problem. The real metric should be reduction in homeless, for example (though even that can be gamed through bussing them out, etc-- tactics that unfortunately other cities have adopted). But attributing that to a single NGO is tough.

Ditto for views, etc. Really what you care about as eg; youtube is conversions for the products that are advertised. Not impressions. But there's an attribution problem there.

Yeah, it is totally NGO that creates homelessness /s

I think you will discover that few organizations use the size or number of edits as a metric of effort. Instead, you might be judged by some measure of productivity (such as resolving issues). Fortunately, language agents are actually useful at coding, when applied judiciously.

> What would a system that rewards people for quality rather than volume look like?

Hiring and tenure review based on a candidate’s selected 5 best papers.

Already standard practice at a few enlightened places, I think. (of course this also probably increases the review workload for top venues)

To a lesser extent, bean-counting metrics like citations and h-index are an attempt to quantify non-volume-based metrics. (for non-academics, h-index is the largest N such that your N-th most cited paper has >= N citations)

Note that most approaches like this have evolved to counter “salami-slicing”, where you divide your work into “minimum publishable units”. LLMs are a different threat - from my selfish point of view, one of the biggest risks is that it takes less time to write a bogus paper with an LLM than it does for a single reviewer to review it. That threatens to upend the entire peer reviewing process.

> Should content creators get paid?

I don't think so. Youtube was a better place when it was just amateurs posting random shit.

> Should content creators get paid?

Everybody "creates content" (like me when I take a picture of beautiful sunset).

There is no such thing as "quality". There is quality for me and quality for you. That is part of the problem, we can't just relate to some external, predefined scale. We (the sum of people) are the approximate, chaotic, inefficient scale.

Be my guest to propose a "perfect system", but - just in case there is no such system - we should make sure each of us "rewards" what we find of quality (being people or content creators), and hope it will prevail. Seemed to have worked so far.

Crazily, I think the easiest way is to remove any and all incentives, awards, finite funding, and allegedly merit-based positions. Allow anyone who wants to research to research. Natural recognition of peers seems to be the only way to my thinking. Of course this relies on a post-scarcity society so short of actually achieving communism we'll likely never see it happen.

That might be the "prize" but the "bar" is most certainly in publish or perisch to work your way up the early academic carreer ladder. Every conference or workshop attendance needs a paper, regardless of wether you had any breakthrough. And early metrics are most often quantity based (at least 4 accepted journal articles), not citation based.

Ideally that is true. I do see the volume-over-quality phenomenon with some early career folks who are trying to expand their CVs. It varies by subfield though. While grant metrics tend to dominate career progression, paper metrics still exist. Plus, it’s super common in those proposals to want to have a bunch of your own papers to cite to argue that you are an expert in the area. That can also drive excess paper production.