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encyclopediai

In June 2026 I proposed a CAPTCHA for scientific publications

At the moment this was seen as a tongue in cheek proposal.

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I’d agree it’d be a funny proposal, wouldn’t have worked back then but funny.

Thanks. IMO the most fun is in the CAPTCHA, which turns on its head the Turing test.

But it goes even further than their greCAPTCHA and it solves their consumed time problem.

Indeed, in their proposal they have a human bottleneck, but in the june 2026 proposal is suggested that one could use an AI to generate the results without the knowledge of the submitted article.

If the AI can generate a pretty close result, with the article fed gradually as a prompt, then reject.

And even further, that it might be not even a need to publish anymore.

Just use the article for training and make a public database with some numbers about the successful researcher, where we see an influence score (how many times an idea from an accepted article are used by other accepted articles), a publication score (how many articles the author had).

I wonder if the reality will be more or less surprising, my bet is on "more".

Sorry to be uncool and try and explain away the joke, but. I'm reading three parts to this.. one is the risk to the job of researches, by the impacts of the systems that they have typically used until now, by being flooded with texts that look like research articles, but are produced by llms.. another is a critique of that system in the first place, in the interaction of both for profit publishing, and research funding based on measuring of publishing in those for-profit journals.. and then there is also a concern about theft of work, and plagiarism, by AI providers, ingesting pre-published work, and training on it, and additionally those providers maybe acting as gate-keepers or .. imposing their own normative values or being opaque and not impartial in how they operate.. Did I parse that correctly?

Yes. The main idea visible through this pile of problems is that human ingenuity (of the management) will find a way to use anything for more money (publishers) or more prestige (academic researchers).

The mathematicians who complain now had no worries about the way the generous idea of open access turned into the gold open access, where the author pays for publication.

These people have no problems with the phd students who are forced to publish or perish and even if they survive there is no future for them.

Now the problem is IMO that for the first time the interest of the publishers and academics are not aligned.

Publishers want more articles to sell back to the academics.

Academics are pushed by the system to publish more.

But all the work is done by academics who write and review the articles.

And also a huge inflation of articles devalue the publication unit.

So a CAPTCHA idea is only natural, even if the kind of a malefic idea a manager could have.

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