Since the log trend seemingly started before the age of LLMs papers - cant we just innocently hope that this reflects increasing popularity of prepublishing on arxivx?
> I can imagine in 2027 academia looking like Moltbook.
This is certainly “directionally correct”, but keep in mind this is all highly uneven across fields and subfields. The people generating slop articles are mostly trying to publish big flashy things, and naturally ML research has it much worse than most other fields. There are many topics that are super important and interesting, but niche or obscure enough that no slop authors is trying to publish on them yet. So plenty of topics are still dominated by real earnest researchers doing their best, but they’re niche enough that you wouldn’t know about them unless you study that field.