Academic publishing is in deep crisis. It didn't start with AI, and it probably wouldn't end with it. The crisis came from trying to turn academia into a factory of some sort.

I coauthored 4 papers this Summer. All bona fide: no AI slop, no fake data, all genuine research papers. But the substance of each is barely enough for a paragraph in a paper I would have gladly written instead.

But I have KPIs. And KPIs don't care about quality, quality is unaccountable. So it is in my best interest to publish a lot of "barely science" instead of spending a year or two writing a good paper that will take another year to publish, and by then my contract will end, and I'll have no numbers to show.