AI Researchers Blamed for Flooding Academia with Low-Quality Outputs
On 9 December 2025, Dr Craig Reeves of Birkbeck, University of London, writing in The Guardian, highlighted a growing concern over the quality of academic research influenced by AI innovations.
Reeves criticizes AI researchers for producing irresponsible innovations and flooding academia with low-quality outputs, which he describes as 'slop.'
Drawing from his experience as a peer reviewer for top ethics journals, Reeves notes that many AI-generated submissions of poor quality have been observed, which are difficult for even experts to detect.
He warns that AI-driven generation threatens to overwhelm traditional quality-control mechanisms such as peer review, potentially blurring standards and drowning out valuable research with noise.
This problem is not confined to AI research alone but has spread to other disciplines affected by the influx of low-quality content.
Reeves calls for accountability and urges the research community not to ignore this issue, cautioning that those who do so should not later claim they were not warned.
