Burkov Satirizes the AI Paper Mill Playbook: Agents Mass-Producing Follow-Up Papers

burkov · x · 2026-09-20

Andriy Burkov, author of The Hundred-Page Machine Learning Book, satirized the emerging academic paper mill: take any published paper, have an AI agent design and run an experiment from its "Future Work" section, have the agent write a follow-up paper on marginally better results, and submit to every second- and third-tier conference — "thousands of times per month. The law of large numbers always works." The post is a pointed commentary on how agent automation is industrializing academic spam.

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