Vadim Sokolov, the co-author of the paper mentioned in the post defends this insane practice and says they reviewed at least one of the 258 generated papers with their own eyes, they are thus not fake papers.

Source: https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/08/27/258/#comme...

IIUC he claims that most of them are just internal notes. In the research group I am, we generate a lot of crap. I'm not sure we reach one per day, but probably 3 per week, but we have some "productive" weeks from time to time.

Sometimes I just write an email (in text) but sometimes it's a short LaTeX document (3 pages, title, date, my name, may have an introduction to ensure we use the same notation, usually no references because I'm lazy). Some of my coworkers are using AI that likes to make longer stuff and format it like a letter to the Nobel foundation.

Some are good, most are wrong or bad. Some are reproductions of others research work, some are early experiments, some are rediscovering the wheel, some are misguided ideas, and lucky a tiny part are good. Anyway, they are for internal use, we don't try to contribute to the thermal death of the universe uploading that crap to a free preprint server.

I don't understand:

a) Why they upload internal notes/reports to a preprint server?

b) Why are these reported as "academic papers"?

This is similar to when Elon claims to be running what, 4-5 different companies as a ceo, and taking care of his children, and sleeping 6 hours a day, and then we observe him shitposting on Twitter constantly or showing off his gaming skills in a game that is literally a time gated grindfest.

You add up all the claimed activities and then realize it’s more hours than are in a day so someone’s lying.

I don’t see how this author can claim that these papers didn’t “…suddenly materialize from a magical “chatbot” in 2026” when it’s obvious that 1-2 people are not producing 258 papers that are tens of pages each in 9 months with any sort of academic rigor.