I don't think we should attribute 60k papers submitted to ICLR to AI. It's a natural evolution of bad incentives, and AI is the tool that fulfills them with minimal effort. When administration and funding agencies count the number of published papers, everybody figures out the "minimal publishable unit" and splits one solid paper into four crappy ones. When top AI professors demand NeurIPS publication from applying master's students, each student tries to win the publication lottery with something small and insignificant. Many papers I read in the past year could have been a tweet with an attached GitHub repository of experiments. We got 15+ pages of write-ups about one-line changes (think something like DyT). Or a brutal mumbo-jumbo mixture of techniques to get improvement in the 3rd decimal place (in many disciplines this is called p-hacking, but we kind of ignore that). Don't blame AI, blame the system.