The Economist 2026-10-20-3
AI and scientific paperwork: productivity boon or slop flood
Grant writing is the case with no checker at all. A typical application takes about 34 days and succeeds about 20% of the time, so one researcher cutting a day a week to 45 minutes still loses most rounds once rivals do the same. Fabricated citations across 2.5m biomedical papers rose 12-fold to about 0.5%, and ICML submissions doubled to 24,000. The cost lands on reviewers, and effort stops working as a signal of seriousness.