Normally I'm an AI skeptic, but in this case there's a good analogy to post-quantum crypto: even if the current state of the art allows fraudulent researchers to evade detection by today's AI by using today's AI, their results, once published, will remain unchanged as the AI improves, and tomorrow's AI will catch them...
Doesn't matter. Lots of bad papers get caught the moment they're published and read by someone, but there's no followup. The institutions don't care if they publish auto-generated spam that can be detected on literally a single read through, they aren't going to deploy advanced AI on their archives of papers to create consequences a decade later:
Are we talking about "bad papers", "fraud", "academic misconduct", or something else? It's a rather important detail.
You would ideally expect blatant fraud to have repercussions, even decades later.
You probably would not expect low quality publications to have direct repercussions, now or ever. This is similar to unacceptably low performance at work. You aren't getting immediately reprimanded for it, but if it keeps up consistently then you might not be working there for much longer.
> The institutions don't care if they publish auto-generated spam
The institutions are generally recognized as having no right to interfere with freedom to publish or freedom to associate. This is a very good thing. So good in fact that it is pretty much the entire point of having a tenure system.
They do tend to get involved if someone commits actual (by which I mean legally defined) fraud.
I think it’s not always a world scale problem as scientific niches tend to be small communities. The challenge is to get these small communities to police themselves.
For the rarer world scale papers we can dedicate more resources to getting vetting them.
Based on my own experience as a peer reviewer and scientist, the issue is not necessarily in detecting plagiarism or fraud. It is in getting editors to care after a paper is already published.
During peer review, this could be great. It could stop a fraudulent paper before it causes any damage. But in my experience, I have never gotten a journal editor to retract an already-published paper that had obvious plagiarism in it (very obvious plagiarism in one case!). They have no incentive to do extra work after the fact with no obvious benefit to themselves. They choose to ignore it instead. I wish it wasn't true, but that has been my experience.
