Mother Nature Does Not Like AI
December 1, 2025
Another dinobaby original. If there is what passes for art, you bet your bippy, that I used smart software. I am a grandpa but not a Grandma Moses.
Nature, the online service and still maybe a printed magazine, published a sour lemonade story. Its title is “Major AI Conference Flooded with Peer Reviews Written Fully by AI.” My reaction was, “Duh! Did you expect originality from AI professionals chasing big bucks?” In my experience, AI innovation appears in the marketing collateral, the cute price trickery for Google Gemini, and the slide decks presented to VCs who don’t want to miss out on the next big thing.
The Nature article states this shocker:
Controversy has erupted after 21% of manuscript reviews for an international AI conference were found to be generated by artificial intelligence.
Once again: Duh!
How about this statement from the write up and its sources?
The conference organizers say they will now use automated tools to assess whether submissions and peer reviews breached policies on using AI in submissions and peer reviews. This is the first time that the conference has faced this issue at scale, says Bharath Hariharan, a computer scientist at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, and senior program chair for ICLR 2026. “After we go through all this process … that will give us a better notion of trust.”
Yep, trust. That’s a quality I admire.
I want to point out that Nature, a publication interested in sticking to the facts, does a little soft shoe and some fancy dancing in the cited article. For example, there are causal claims about how conferences operate. I did not spot any data, but I am a dinobaby prone to overlook the nuances of modern scientific write ups. Also, the article seems to want a fix now. Yeah, well, that is unlikely. LLMs change so that smart software tuned to find AI generated content are not exactly as reliable as a 2025 Toyota RAV.
Also, I am not sure fixes implemented by human reviewers and abstract readers will do the job. When I had the joyful opportunity to review submissions for a big time technical journal, I did a pretty good job on the first one or two papers tossed at me. But, to be honest, by paper three I was not sure I had the foggiest idea what I was doing. I probably would have approved something written by a French bulldog taking mushrooms for inspiration.
If you are in the journal article writing game or giving talks at conferences, think about AI. Whether you use it or not, you may be accused of taking short cuts. That’s important because professional publishers and conference organizers never take short cuts. They take money.
Stephen E Arnold, December 1, 2025
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