Idk if we're automating humans out of the publishing loop as much as rapidly automating the production of crap. I had a very similar experience reviewing for EMNLP recently.

We are nowhere near AI being able to judge the quality of research (in fact, one might reasonably state that even most humans can't really judge the quality of research). Most things in society are not like math: we can't automate (via verification) our way out of noise overwhelming the signal.

Folks are willing to entirely abuse the public resource that is faithful, honest reviewing. (This is unsurprising; the abuse of the commons / public resources has been rising for a long time). There isn't a good solution other than something akin to draconian social scoring to limit access to the reviewing system.

People should get paid for reviewing. That’s the solution. Publishing companies rack in billions of dollars in pure profit exploring free labor. Once people actually get paid for reviewing, it becomes much faster and higher quality and you won’t need AI triage.

I think you are correct, its so hard to judge the quality of research that we have been using publication record/count as a proxy. Ultimately, having papers being easy to write is good, provided we find a better way of judging quality.

> draconian social scoring

This is a legitimate question: should people have reputations? Should their behavior be made more visible publicly, both good and bad? How?

In a small contained society, where consequences are more directly affecting individuals immedately, these questions don't need to be asked, because they're inherantly answered. We now are a society with billions of people, and dire consequences sometimes deferred for a generation, or more. Part of our general failing is the lack of good answers to the above questions. For many people, there are rarely negative consequences for causing harm to others, and the rewards can be very great indeed.