General Physics Colloquium, Professor Paul Ginsparg, Cornell University

Title:  The Rise of Slop

Host:  Jennet Dickinson

Abstract:  The rapid proliferation of AI-generated text, figures, code, and reviews is reshaping the ecology of research communication. AI has made it cheap to produce text that looks like knowledge. The result is an emerging deluge of "slop": fluent, confident, and often content-light material that strains the filters of research and academic publishing. While generative tools promise efficiency, accessibility, and assistance, they also undermine the fragile social contracts on which scholarship depends: authorship, attribution, review, and trust. This talk argues that the core danger of AI-generated slop is not isolated fraud or error, but volume: content produced faster than it can be meaningfully evaluated. The rise of slop forces a choice: retrofit our scholarly systems for an age of cheap language, or watch signal drown in noise. [Disclaimer: this abstract was 100% LLM-generated.]