Science should become a marketplace of ideas. Your other criticisms are completely valid. Those should be what’s front and center. And I agree with you. The conclusions of the paper are premature and designed to grab headlines and get citations. Might as well be posting “first post” on slashdot. IMO we should not see the current standard of peer review as anything other than anachronistic.
The scenario I am thinking of is academic A submitting a manuscript to an academic journal, which gets passed on by the journal editor to a number of reviewers, one of whom is academic B. B has a lot on their plate at the moment, but sees a way to quickly dispose of the reviewing task, thus maintaining a possibly illusory 'good standing' in the journal's eyes, by simply throwing the manuscript to an LLM to review. There are (at least) two negative scenarios here: 1. The paper contains embedded (think white text on a white background) instructions left by academic A to any LLM reading the manuscript to view it in a positive light, regardless of how well the described work has been conducted. This has already happened IRL, by the way. 2. Academic A didn't embed LLM instructions, but receives the review report, which show clear signs that the reviewer either didn't understand the paper, gave unspecific comments, highlighted only typos or simply used phrasing that seems artifically-generated. A now feels aggrieved that their paper was not given the attention and consideration it deserved by an academic peer and now has a negative opinion of the journal for (seemingly) allowing the paper to be LLM-reviewed. And just as journals will have great difficulty filtering for LLM-generated manuscripts, it will also find it very difficult to filter for LLM-generated reviewers reports.
Granted, scenario 2 already happens with only humans in the loop (the dreaded 'Reviewer 2' academic meme). But LLMs can only make this much much worse.
Both scenarios destroy trust in the whole idea of peer-reviewed science journals.
Absolutely not. I am an advocate for peer review, warts and all, and find that it has significant value. From a personal perspective, peer review has improved or shot down 100% of the papers that I have worked on -- which to me indicates its value to ensure good ideas with merit make it through. Papers I've reviewed are similarly improved -- no one knows everything and its helpful to have others with knowledge add their voice, even when the reviewers also add cranky items.[0] I would grant that it isn't a perfect process (some reviewers, editors are bad, some steal ideas) -- but that is why the marketplace of ideas exists across journals.
> Science should become a marketplace of ideas.
This already happens. The scholarly sphere is the savanna when it comes to resources -- it looks verdant and green but it is highly resource constrained. A shitty idea will get ripped apart unless it comes from an elephant -- and even then it can be torn to shreds.
That it happens behind paywalls is a huge problem, and the incentive structures need to be changed for that. But unless we want blatant charlatanism running rampant, you want quality checks.
[0] https://x.com/JustinWolfers/status/591280547898462209?lang=e... if a car were a manuscript