What an interesting problem to have!
So, let's see, we have a hosting site, much like GitHub is for code, or DropBox is for files, or Pastebin is for text, or YouTube is for Videos, except that this website is tailored to hosting academic papers as opposed to other specific file types...
Now in 2026 we have a problem, and that is that AI (or people using AI) are apparently writing crappy AI-written academic papers, and uploading them to ArXiv (and other academic paper hosting sites) in large amounts...
What to do, what to do?
Hmmm, this sounds very similar to the problem of many crappy AI-generated videos being uploaded to YouTube...
Or, the "AI-generated-file-of-specific-type-was-uploaded-where-the-file-contents-of-uploaded-files-of-that-type-are-NOT-supposed-to-be-AI-generated-on-this-specific-file-type-hosting-website" problem...
What to do, what to do?
Well, heck, I don't know!
What shall we all do?!?!?!?!?!?
Observation (if I might!): The "people using AI to upload crap to the Internet" problem is a subset of the (older, larger!) "people just plain uploading crap to the Internet" pre-AI problem... :-)
>"Lots of suggestions in the comments but no magic bullets."
This is Hacker News after all; what were you expecting? Silence? :-)