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  • Hacker News
  • Isn’t github the normal way of publishing now for cs ?
    by naveen99
  • Does Google Scholar index it?
    by macleginn
  • The PDFs (yes, they still use PDF) keep being uploaded to arXiv.
    by cubefox
  • I have a hunch that most of the slop is not just on CS but specifically about AI. For some reason, a lot of people's first idea when they encounter an LLM is "let's have this LLM write an opinion piece about LLMs", as if they want to test its self-awareness or hack it by self-recursion. And then they get a medley of the learning data, which if they are lucky contains some technical explanations sprinkled in.

    That said, AI-generated papers have already been spotted in other disciplines besides cs, and some of them are really obvious (arXiv:2508.11634v1 starts with a review of a non-existing paper). I really hope arXiv won't react by narrowing its scope to "novel research only"; in fact there is already AI slop in that category and it is harder to spot for a moderator.

    ("Peer-reviewed papers only" is mostly equivalent to "go away". Authors post on the arXiv in order to get early feedback, not just to have their paper openly accessible. And most journals at least formally discourage authors from posting their papers on the arXiv.)

    by generationP
  • The review paper is dead... so this is a good development. Like you can generate these things in a couple of iterations with AI and minor edits. Preprint servers could be dealing with 1000s of review/position papers over short periods of time and then this wastes precious screening work hours.

    It is a bit different in other fields where interpretations or know-how might be communicated in a review paper format that is otherwise not possible. For example, in biology relating to a new phenomena or function.

    by physarum_salad
  • Review papers are summarizations to recent updates in the field that deserve fellow researchers' attention. Such works should be done annually or at most quarterly in my opinion, to include only time-tested results. If hundreds of review papers are published every month, I am afraid that their quality in terms of paper selection and innovative interpretation/direction will not be much higher than the content generated by LLM, even if written word-to-word by a real scientist.

    LLMs are good at plainly summarizing from the public knowledge base. Scientists should invest their time in contributing new knowledge to public base instead of doing the summarization.

    by bulubulu
  • A good review paper is infinitely better than an llm managing to find a few papers and making a summary. A knowledgeable researcher knows which papers are outdated and can make a trustworthy review paper, an LLM can't easily do that yet
    by awestroke
  • > you can generate these things in a couple of iterations with AI

    The problem is you can’t. Not without careful review of the output. (Certainly not if you’re writing about anything remotely novel and thus useful.)

    But not everyone knows that, which turns private ignorance into a public review problem.

    by JumpCrisscross
  • What are review papers for anyway? I think they are either for

    1) new grad students to end up with something nice to publish after reviewing the literature or,

    2) older professors to write a big overview of everything that happened in their field as sort of a “bible” that can get you up to speed

    The former is useful as a social construct; I mean, hey, new grad students, don’t skimp on your literature review. Finding out a couple years in that folks had already done something sorta similar to my work was absolutely gut-wrenching.

    For the latter, I don’t think LLMs are quite ready to replace the personal experiences of a late-career professor, right?

    by bee_rider
  • I'm not sure this is the right way to handle it (I don't know what is) but arXiv.org has suffered from poor quality self-promotion papers in CS for a long time now. Years before llms.
    by ants_everywhere
  • How precisely does it "suffer" though? It's basically a way to disseminate results but carries no journalistic prestige in itself. It's a fun place to look now and then for new results, but just reading the "front page" of a category has always been a Caveat Emptor situation.
    by jvanderbot
  • Great move by arXiv—clear standards for reviews and position papers are crucial in fast-moving areas like multi-agent systems and agentic LLMs. Requiring machine-readable metadata (type=review/position, inclusion criteria, benchmark coverage, code/data links) and consistent cross-listing (cs.AI/cs.MA) would help readers and tools filter claims, especially in distributed/parallel agentic AI where evaluation is fragile. A standardized “Survey”/“Position” tag plus a brief reproducibility checklist would set expectations without stifling early ideas.
    by whatpeoplewant
  • i would like to understand what people get, or think they get, out of putting a completely AI-generated survey paper on arXiv.

    Even if AI writes the paper for you, it's still kind of a pain in the ass to go through the submission process, get the LaTeX to compile on their servers, etc., there is a small cost to you. Why do this?

    by currymj
  • Published papers are part of the EB-1 visa rubric so huge value in getting your content into these indexes:

    "One specific criterion is the ‘authorship of scholarly articles in professional or major trade publications or other major media’. The quality and reputation of the publication outlet (e.g., impact factor of a journal, editorial review process) are important factors in the evaluation”

    by ec109685
  • Presumably a sense of accomplishment to brandish with family and less informed employers.
    by unethical_ban
  • Gaming the h-index has been a thing for a long time in circles where people take note of such things. There are academics who attach their name to every paper that goes through their department (even if they contributed nothing), there are those who employ a mountain of grad students to speed run publishing junk papers... and now with LLMs, one can do it even faster!
    by swiftcoder
  • The Tragedy of the Commons, updated for LLMs. Part #975 in a continuing series.

    These things will ruin everything good, and that is before we even start talking about audio or video.

    by exasperaited
  • Spammers ruin everything. This gives the spammers a force multiplier.
    by hoistbypetard
  • Part #975, but that's only because we overflowed the 64-bit counter. Again.
    by kibwen
  • The HN submission title is incorrect.

    > Before being considered for submission to arXiv’s CS category, review articles and position papers must now be accepted at a journal or a conference and complete successful peer review.

    Edit: original title was "arXiv No Longer Accepts Computer Science Position or Review Papers Due to LLMs"

    by thomascountz
  • I don’t know about this. From a pure entertainment standpoint, we may be denying ourselves a world of hilarity. LLMs + “You know Peter, I’m something of a research myself” delusions. I’d pay for this so long as people are very serious about the delusion.
    by ivape
  • We've reverted it now.
    by dang
  • Agree. Additionally, original title, "arXiv No Longer Accepts Computer Science Position or Review Papers Due to LLMs" is ambiguous. “Due to LLMs” is being interpreted as articles written by LLMs, which is not accurate.
    by catlifeonmars
  • Isn't arXiv where you upload things before they have gone through the entire process? Isn't that the entire value, aside from some publisher cartel busting?
    by stefan_
  • refined title:

    ArXiv CS requires peer review for surveys amid flood of AI-written ones

    - nothing happened to preprints

    - "summarization" articles always required it, they are just pointing at it out loud

    by dimava
  • it's clearly not sutainable to have the main website hosting CS articles not having any reviews or restrictions. (Except for the initial invite system) There were 26k submission in october: https://arxiv.org/stats/monthly_submissions

    Asking for a small amount of money would probably help. Issue with requiring peer reviewed journals or conferences is the severe lag, takes a long time and part of the advantage of arxiv was that you could have the paper instantly as a preprint. Also these conferences and journals are also receiving enormous quantities of submissions (29.000 for AAAI) so we are just pushing the problem.

    by DalasNoin
  • I think it worked well for metafilter: $1/1euro one-time charge to join. But that's probably worth it to spam Arxiv with junk.
    by skopje
  • I like this idea. A small contribution would be a good filter. Looking at the stats it’s quite crazy. Didn’t know that we could access to this data. Thanks for sharing.
    by mottiden
  • I'll add the amount should be enough to cover at least a cursory review. A full review would be better. I just don't want to price out small players.

    The papers could also be categorized as unreviewed, quick check, fully reviewed, or fully reproduced. They could pay for this to be done or verified. Then, we have a reputational problem to deal with on the reviewer side.

    by nickpsecurity
  • It’s not a money issue. People publish these papers to get jobs, into schools, visa’s and whatnot. Way more than $30 in value from being “published”.
    by ec109685