Researcher pushes back on LLM peer review: papers can judge correctness, not significance

sethlazar · x · 2026-09-27

A heated debate over letting LLMs take part in academic peer review. sethlazar argues: switching to a system that is "too new to be verified or validated" is premature; research shows papers are decent at establishing correctness but poor at evaluating significance. He runs an automated newsletter where LLM agents pick papers for his lab and finds their taste "mediocre to crap." His position: once models can do automatic verification, the situation changes — but we should prove we've reached that point before handing over the intellectual ecology, and even then design safeguards proactively. Both sides agree it's a verifiable empirical question best settled by experiments.

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