Comment by eloisant

The real problem is that researchers are pushed to publish as their publication is the only way their career can advance. It's not even to "boost" your CV, as a researcher your publication history IS your CV.

It was already a problem 25 years ago when I did my Ph.D., and I don't think things changed that much since then.

This encourages researchers to publish barely valuable results, or to cut one articles into multiple ones with small variations to increase their number of publications. Also publishers creating more conferences and more journals to respond to the need that researchers have to publish.

I remember many experienced professors telling me cynically about this, about all the techniques they had to blow up one small finding into many articles.

Anyway - research slop started way before AI. It's probably going to make the problem worse, but the root issue have been there for a long time.