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Comment by mlmonkey | Hacker News Reader

Boy do I have news for you! :-D

"low quality, superficial reviews" have always been around. Reviewing is most often an unpaid, thankless job and many times reviewers barely put in the effort.

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There is still a difference. Previously, if the review was low quality and superficial, it was also quite short and easy to answer. Now I receive fully LLM-written reviews of 2-3 pages (or more) of superficial comments asking for tons of additional text and experiments that are almost always outside the scope of the work. Answering such a review requires a lot of work with absolutely no gain.

I hear you. I just happened to submit a paper to Neurips this year, and the "reviewer" sent back so many questions, etc. that the character limit of the response could never accomodate my response. So I just addressed a few of the main points and called it a day.

I am sure an LLM review could be made much shorter with some prompting.

The character limit thing is real. Another problem is that even if you manage to address all of their points, they're not required to engage with that. They can just ask the LLM to write a basic response back and say they won't change the score.

Similar experience to sibling: a disinterested human isn't going to ask for 30 different detailed things to add to, or change in, the paper that could technically be improved but aren't worth the additional page real estate. An LLM reviewer definitely does this.

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