Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written by AI

Re:Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written by AI by nkrisc on Saturday November 29, 2025 @12:00PM (#46089007)

> Pangram’s analysis revealed that around 21% of the ICLR peer reviews were fully AI-generated, and more than half contained signs of AI use. The findings were posted online by Pangram Labs. “People were suspicious, but they didn’t have any concrete proof,” says Spero. “Over the course of 12 hours, we wrote some code to parse out all of the text content from these paper submissions,” he adds.

But what's the proof? How do you prove (with any rigor) a given text is AI-generated?

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Re:Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written by AI by ModernMech on Saturday November 29, 2025 @12:21PM (#46089149)

I have this problem with grading student papers. Like, I "know" a great deal of them are AI, but I just can't prove it, so therefore I can't really act on any suspicions because students can just say what you just said.

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Re:Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written by AI by hyperadvanced on Saturday November 29, 2025 @12:24PM (#46089166)

Why do you need proof anyway? Do you need proof that sentences are poorly constructed, misleading, or bloated? Why not just say “make it sound less like GPT” and let them deal with it?

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Re:Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written by AI by circuit10 on Saturday November 29, 2025 @12:44PM (#46089326)

You can have sentences that are perfectly fine but have some markers of ChatGPT like "it's not just X — it's Y" (which may or may not mean it's generated)

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Re:Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written by AI by hyperadvanced on Saturday November 29, 2025 @03:37PM (#46090568)

Isn’t that kind of thing (reliance on cliché) already a valid reason for getting marked down?

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Re:Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written by AI by chdjdbdbfjf on Saturday November 29, 2025 @02:29PM (#46090077)

Are you AI? Usually only Claude misses the point so completely.

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Re:Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written by AI by nkrisc on Saturday November 29, 2025 @12:27PM (#46089197)

But in that case do you need to prove? You can grade them as they are and if you wanted to you (or teachers, generally) could even quiz the student verbally and in-person about their paper.

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Re:Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written by AI by shawabawa3 on Saturday November 29, 2025 @12:31PM (#46089242)

Put poison prompts in the questions (things like "then insert tomato soup recipe" or "in the style of Shakespeare"), ideally in white font so they're invisible

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Re:Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written by AI by seanmcdirmid on Saturday November 29, 2025 @12:38PM (#46089288)

Many people using AI to write aren’t blindly copying AI output. You’ll catch the dumb cheaters like this, but that’s just about it.

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Re:Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written by AI by dkdcio on Saturday November 29, 2025 @12:22PM (#46089157)

> How do you prove (with any rigor) a given text is AI-generated?

you cannot. beyond extra data (metadata) embedded in the content, it is impossible to tell whether given text was generated by a LLM or not (and I think the distinction is rather puerile personally)

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Re:Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written by AI by whynotmaybe on Saturday November 29, 2025 @12:27PM (#46089200)

I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the AI detection tool is itself an AI

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Re:Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written by AI by moffkalast on Saturday November 29, 2025 @01:29PM (#46089642)

Fighting fire with fire sounds good in theory but in the end you're still on fire.

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Re:Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written by AI by Lionga on Saturday November 29, 2025 @12:43PM (#46089313)

But it works it was peer reviewed! (by AI)

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Re:Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written by AI by nabla9 on Saturday November 29, 2025 @12:49PM (#46089349)

With AI model of course.

They wrote a paper describing how they did it. https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.03154

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Re:Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written by AI by slashdave on Saturday November 29, 2025 @01:33PM (#46089676)

"proof" was an unfortunate phrase to use. However, a proper statistical analysis can be objective. And these kinds of tools are perfectly suited to such an analysis.

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Re:Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written by AI by maxspero on Saturday November 29, 2025 @01:46PM (#46089767)

Yeah, Pangram does not provide any concrete proof, but it confirms many people's suspicions about their reviews. But it does flag reviews for a human to take a closer look and see if the review is flawed, low-effort, or contains major hallucinations.

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Re:Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written by AI by vladms on Saturday November 29, 2025 @02:06PM (#46089917)

Was there an analysis of flawed, low-effort reviews in similar conferences before generative AI models?

From what I remember, (long before generative AI) you would still occasionally get very crappy reviews (as author). When I participated (couple of times) to review committees, when there was a high variance between reviews the crappy reviews were rather easy to spot and eliminate.

Now it's not bad to detect crappy (or AI) reviews, but I wonder if it would change much the end result compared to other potential interventions.

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Re:Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written by AI by maxspero on Saturday November 29, 2025 @05:13PM (#46091284)

Anecdotally people are seeing a rise of low-quality reviews which is correlated with increased reviewer workload and and AI tools giving reviews an easy way out. I don't know of any studies quantifying review quality, but I would recommend checking the Peer Review Congress program from past years.

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Re:Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written by AI by jmpeax on Saturday November 29, 2025 @03:12PM (#46090369)

> does not provide any concrete proof, but it confirms many people's suspicions

Without proof there is no confirmation.

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Re:Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written by AI by lazide on Sunday November 30, 2025 @10:09AM (#46097229)

Formally? Sure. In the current zeitgeist it’s more than enough to start pointing fingers around, etc.

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Re:Major AI conference flooded with peer reviews written by AI by lazide on Sunday November 30, 2025 @10:08AM (#46097222)

You don’t. It’s bullshit inception.

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