Economist Calls for Zero Tolerance of AI Writing in Journals, Sparking Academic Debate

On September 24, development economist Paul Novosad, writing as "a disillusioned reviewer," posted a series of threads arguing that academic journals should adopt a zero-tolerance policy toward AI-generated writing, sparking wide discussion in academia. His concrete proposal is to screen submissions with AI-detection tools such as Pangram and ban violators from submitting for two years; philosopher Seth Lazar endorsed the idea and proposed even harsher penalties. In exchanges with critics, Novosad clarified that his target is the scale of AI slop, not ghostwriting itself.

Confirmed

• Novosad's core claim is "writing is thinking": journals have every reason to require that at least one scholar has genuinely thought deeply about the topic and written several pages in their own hand.
• Concretely, he proposes screening submissions with detection tools like Pangram, with a two-year submission ban for violators.
• Seth Lazar proposed stricter rules: if a paper is found to be substantially AI-written, the submission is rejected, published papers are retracted, and the author is permanently banned from the journal.
• He stressed that the new problem of the AI era is volume: large volumes of low-quality submissions require substantial human reviewer time to identify as junk—something that never happened in the era of human assistants. He added that in the social sciences, writing itself is the thinking process, and the understanding generated while writing has value worth sharing, possibly unlike in STEM fields.
• He acknowledged some defensible uses of AI but argued these exceptions will be drowned by a flood of low-quality AI-generated text, demoralizing reviewers and ultimately killing journals—a "bad money drives out good" dynamic.
• In response to Franco Calabres's point that human ghostwriting and editing for senior scientists was already common 40 years ago, Novosad replied that his objection is not to ghostwriting per se but to the massive scale of AI slop.
• He further argued that even if AI generating and evaluating economics research has value, once it mixes into the existing journal system under a "don't ask, don't tell" equilibrium about AI involvement, peer review and the journal system will collapse; AI-generated research needs a separate publishing venue.
• In the discussion, ipeirotis offered an alternative: low-quality papers have always existed, AI will not go away, and institutions should adapt rather than block. He said that if "technical correctness" could be handled first in review (e.g., AI reviewers filtering technical errors), he would gladly review only technically correct papers and focus on judging interest; for papers written with AI but with conclusions that hold up, he does not care about AI involvement—implying skepticism about the reliability of tools like Pangram. lpachter also joined via a repost commenting "Kill journals?"

Why it matters

• "Bad money drives out good" is the mechanism at the core of the argument: without restrictions, diligent authors competing with AI-written slop will gradually exit, reviewer morale erodes, and journal quality declines systematically.
• The exchange with critics moved the debate from "can AI be detected" to "what exactly is being banned—ghostwriting or volume," with Novosad's answer showing his target is the scaled flood of AI-generated content.
• The position touches on the survival preconditions of peer review—whether journals may require authors to prove hands-on writing—and proposes bifurcating academic publishing in the AI era (human-written papers and AI-generated research in separate venues), while ipeirotis's response represents the "fight AI with AI" institutional-reform route; the tension between these two paths will continue to shape academic publishing.

2026-09-24 ~ 2026-09-25 · 12 related posts

Full story(3 episodes)→

• Episode 1: Economist Calls for Zero Tolerance of AI Writing in Journals, Sparking Academic Debate(2026-09-24, 12 posts)
• Episode 2: Economist Novosad Says He'll Reject AI-Sounding Papers, Calls for Separating AI and Human Writing(2026-10-03, 7 posts)
• Episode 3: Economist Refuses to Review AI-Written Papers, Sparking Debate(2026-10-05, 4 posts)

• Economist Calls for Zero Tolerance on AI Writing in Journals as Slop Threatens Peer Review — paulnovosad · 2026-09-24
• Economist urges journals to adopt zero tolerance for AI-written papers, with 2-year bans — paulnovosad · 2026-09-24
• Referee laments AI-written papers: journals can require proof that authors actually think — paulnovosad · 2026-09-24
• Economist: AI-assisted research will break the journal system's 'don't ask don't tell' equilibrium — paulnovosad · 2026-09-24
• Economist urges journals to adopt zero tolerance for AI writing — Franco_Calabres · 2026-09-24
• [source] Economist on journal AI-writing bans: human ghostwriting was never the issue — paulnovosad · 2026-09-24
• Economist: AI submissions burn massive human review time to be identified as trash — paulnovosad · 2026-09-24
• [source] Economists debate AI slop in journals: use AI reviewers for correctness, but how to rank interestingness? — ipeirotis · 2026-09-24
• Reviewers should verify correctness, not AI authorship — Pangram won't get us there — ipeirotis · 2026-09-24
• Economist calls for zero tolerance on AI writing to save journals from slop avalanche — anshulkundaje · 2026-09-25

2 near-duplicate retellings: paulnovosad · paulnovosad