Lazy, or even fake articles written by LLMs are wreaking havoc among scientists, but only because the scientific publishing industry was rotting on its own.

As stated in Goodhart’s law ‒ and excellently illustrated by autistic researchers’ darling xkcd‒ whenever a metric becomes a target, it stops being a good metric. Indeed, the system has grown so full of exploits that the target has been divorced entirely from quality.