[TYPES] AI-generated conference submissions

[Jeremy Gibbons]

I'm late to this party: I've been travelling while the debate has been raging on the mailing list.

To those who "don't see why it matters how an excellent paper was written; all that matters is that it is excellent", I commend Borges's short story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote". See eg

https://urldefense.com/v3/__https://raley.english.ucsb.edu/wp-content/Engl10/Pierre-Menard.pdf__;!!IBzWLUs!VXLVd0zukL_GnIgotP_pCLhfpI_1QSWM5izJ2-xQWV2EaywVktGYCybkiuRK_b4loapIE39cWHmF5wMtUhE4WVmcULSKc4Sx8NWsbmSp$ 

and any number of online commentaries.

In the story, Menard writes a word-for-word copy of Don Quixote, three centuries after Cervantes. Borges' point is that it is nevertheless not the same text: the context in which it was written is completely different, and therefore so is its meaning.

Science is not just the recording of bald facts. We are telling stories. And the context of the storytelling affects the meaning of the story.

Jeremy

On 17 Mar 2026, at 16:33, Klaus Ostermann <klaus.ostermann at uni-tuebingen.de> wrote:

[ The Types Forum, http://lists.seas.upenn.edu/mailman/listinfo/types-list  ]

Isn't any attempt to ban the use of AI a rear guard battle that we can only loose in the long term?

Wouldn't it be better to accept the new reality that any kind of serious text will be prepared with the help of AI in the future?

In the humanities, completely AI-generated papers have already been accepted at top-level venues.

There is little doubt that AI can help us write better papers, too.

What we don't want is low-quality papers that waste precious reviewer time (who presumably also
increasingly use AI for their reviews sometimes).

But from a purely scientific perspective I don't see why it matters how an excellent paper was written; all that
matters is that it is excellent.

Klaus


Jeremy.Gibbons at cs.ox.ac.uk
Oxford University Department of Computer Science,
Wolfson Building, Parks Road, Oxford OX1 3QD, UK.
+44 1865 283521
https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://www.cs.ox.ac.uk/people/jeremy.gibbons/__;!!IBzWLUs!VXLVd0zukL_GnIgotP_pCLhfpI_1QSWM5izJ2-xQWV2EaywVktGYCybkiuRK_b4loapIE39cWHmF5wMtUhE4WVmcULSKc4Sx8O7bCAkg$