Peer Review Paranoia: The system is built on trust between scholars. AI is undermining that.

From an essay that includes a reflection on discovering AI-fabricated quotes while peer-reviewing a scholarly essay for potential publication. (Academics don’t get paid for the labor of pre-reading scholarly drafts for potential review. An author who uses AI is squandering the resources of human peer-reviewers.)

Humanistic study once promised — and for many, still delivers — the prize of considering what matters most: deeper self-understanding, an ethic of truth and rigor, social commitment and civic responsibility, aesthetic refinement, mutual understanding.

Generative AI cannot eliminate these fundamental pursuits; they will matter for as long as humans exist. And under the right circumstances, used with extreme care, some AI systems might even help us study ourselves more carefully. But our techno-feudal overlords and those who eagerly serve them have been working to remake the university, transforming it increasingly into an inhospitable home for humanistic study. I was reminded of the craze for massive open online courses, or MOOCs, a decade or so back, which promised to deliver charismatic mass instruction at scale.

AI has once more given many in power a pretext to do what they’ve wanted to do anyway: to dismantle the humanities for parts, remaking academe wholly into a credential mill, with some nice gyms and fancy cafeterias, an institution disconnected from thinking and learning. –Lee Konstantinou, Chronicle of Higher Education