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Comment by totetsu | Hacker News Reader

It seems there is a lot of this kind of AI risk. I'm trying to find the right label for it. Something that was a common good, that worked at a human scale, is now made unviable because automation has pushed it beyond what it can handle and still be useful.

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several authors including the creator of arxiv, Paul Ginsparg, foretell a future in which we "increasingly rely on status markers such as author pedigree and institutional affiliation as signals of quality, ironically counteracting the democratizing effects of LLMs on scientific production." I think this is a very plausible outcome of a flood of preprints. Because there's only so much time in a day and are we going to spend it on papers by less established people who we do not trust? It's a pity. If the science is good what does it matter who produced it.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2601.13187

Some government should fund a preprint server where the submissions are screened by open weight models. Ultimately AI prescreening is far more scalable than human prescreening.

Thus biasing submissions' language and content towards those most palatable to those open-weight models, creating further incentives to generate articles wholesale with them, and incentives against publishing null findings

But is it any good?

Alternatively perhaps robust AI powered review pipelines eventually come into being. At that point the system as a whole would resemble a semi-supervised GAN setup optimizing for scientific paper quality. It might end up producing good results. (An absolute nightmare for the year or two leading up to that though.)

I wonder how Bayes filters will work for it.

This applies also to things at the human scale, when some wider group gets access to a common good.

Internet forums when internet access was only available to college students vs Internet forums today (called Eternal September, September being the month when new Freshman got access to the internet, Eternal September being when everyone in the developed world did)

Perhaps Eternal September

tragedy of the commons.

Is it just the same as that?

Well, somewhat. it's the same underlying behavior of individuals/organizations seeking advantage, leading to overuse and breakage. ..and, similarly, the resolution is in individuals backing public will. that is, someone (arxiv) takes an interest in the commons (scientific paper publishing) and curates/controls a segment of it, actively preventing abuse.

A tragedy for every commons!

Abuse.

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