Fighting AI Slop in Academic Publishing

The prominent academic pre-print repository arXiv has reportedly announced stiff new penalties for authors who submit papers with AI-generated hallucinations (e.g., fake citations). Violators will be subject to a one-year outright ban on submissions, and an indefinite requirement that any future uploads must have been accepted by a "reputable peer-reviewed venue".This is as good a prompt as any for why I am slightly -- slightly -- more optimistic about the ability of academia to fend off the tsunami of AI slop compared to other entities in the business of generating texts. One problem with AI slop in, say, the news space is that it's essentially impossible to impose meaningful sanctions on violators. It's essentially spam bots -- if one site gets delisted, another springs up in its place. The spammers don't care specifically about the reputation of this website or that (usually fake) author. The main goal is to get their text out in the world; it doesn't matter so much who it's…