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The AI Review Lottery: Widespread AI-Assisted Peer Reviews Boost Paper Scores and Acceptance Rates

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arxiv 2405.02150 v1 pith:3N6E624K submitted 2024-05-03 cs.CY

classification cs.CY
keywords ai-assistedreviewspeerreviewscoresacceptanceimpactconference
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal
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abstract

Journals and conferences worry that peer reviews assisted by artificial intelligence (AI), in particular, large language models (LLMs), may negatively influence the validity and fairness of the peer-review system, a cornerstone of modern science. In this work, we address this concern with a quasi-experimental study of the prevalence and impact of AI-assisted peer reviews in the context of the 2024 International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), a large and prestigious machine-learning conference. Our contributions are threefold. Firstly, we obtain a lower bound for the prevalence of AI-assisted reviews at ICLR 2024 using the GPTZero LLM detector, estimating that at least $15.8\%$ of reviews were written with AI assistance. Secondly, we estimate the impact of AI-assisted reviews on submission scores. Considering pairs of reviews with different scores assigned to the same paper, we find that in $53.4\%$ of pairs the AI-assisted review scores higher than the human review ($p = 0.002$; relative difference in probability of scoring higher: $+14.4\%$ in favor of AI-assisted reviews). Thirdly, we assess the impact of receiving an AI-assisted peer review on submission acceptance. In a matched study, submissions near the acceptance threshold that received an AI-assisted peer review were $4.9$ percentage points ($p = 0.024$) more likely to be accepted than submissions that did not. Overall, we show that AI-assisted reviews are consequential to the peer-review process and offer a discussion on future implications of current trends

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Cited by 14 Pith papers

Reviewed papers in the Pith corpus that reference this work. Sorted by Pith novelty score.

  1. AI-Assisted Peer Review at Scale: The AAAI-26 AI Review Pilot

    cs.AI 2026-04 conditional novelty 9.0 of 10

    AI reviews for all 22,977 AAAI-26 papers were preferred by authors and PC members over human reviews on accuracy and suggestions and outperformed baselines at spotting weaknesses.

  2. AutoSupervision: Closing the Feedback Loop in Scientific Workflows with Grounded Revision Verification

    cs.CL 2026-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    On a new 8,790-instance benchmark built from Nature Communications review records, LLMs characterize reviewer concerns well (GPT-5.5: 0.754) but verify evidence-backed revision resolution poorly (best 0.501).

  3. GraphReview: Scientific Paper Evaluation via LLM-Based Graph Message Passing

    cs.CL 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    GraphReview models paper evaluation as LLM-driven message passing on a semantic paper graph that links intrinsic quality, contemporaneous papers, and prior work, then applies Personalized PageRank for ranking and revi...

  4. LLMs learn scientific taste from institutional traces across the social sciences

    cs.AI 2026-03 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    Fine-tuned LLMs trained on social science publication records outperform experts and frontier models at judging which research pitches deserve attention.

  5. ChatGPT: Excellent Paper! Accept It. Editor: Imposter Found! Review Rejected

    cs.CR 2025-12 unverdicted novelty 6.0 of 10

    Authors show prompt injection attacks that jailbreak LLM paper reviewers for biased acceptance and propose embedding triggers to detect when reviews are LLM-generated rather than human.

  6. The Pluralistic Moral Gap: Understanding Judgment and Value Differences between Humans and Large Language Models

    cs.CL 2025-07 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    LLMs align with human moral judgments only under high consensus, concentrate on a narrow set of moral values, and the profile-based prompting method's reported improvement is evaluated in-sample.

  7. PeerCheck: Enhancing LLM-Generated Academic Reviews Towards Human-Level Quality

    cs.CL 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0 of 10

    PeerCheck finds that chain-of-thought prompting improves LLM academic reviews while retrieval-augmented generation sometimes lowers quality, and that LLMs and humans emphasize different aspects of papers.

  8. Agentic Publication Protocol: An Attempt to Modernize Scientific Publication

    cs.DL 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 5.0 of 10

    Introduces the Agentic Publication Protocol (APP) as a repository-based standard for publishing papers together with reproducibility artifacts and agent instructions.

  9. SafeReview: Defending LLM-based Review Systems Against Adversarial Hidden Prompts

    cs.CL 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0 of 10

    SafeReview trains a Generator to create adversarial prompts and a Defender to detect them via co-evolution with an IR-GAN-inspired loss, claiming better resilience than static defenses for LLM-based peer review.

  10. Impact of large language models on peer review opinions from a fine-grained perspective: Evidence from top conference proceedings in AI

    cs.CL 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 5.0 of 10

    Peer review reports in AI conferences have grown longer and more standardized after LLMs, with increased emphasis on surface-level clarity and summaries at the expense of deeper critiques on originality and replicability.

  11. LLM-Based Scientific Peer Review: Methods, Benchmarks, and Reliability Challenges

    cs.CL 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 4.0 of 10

    A survey synthesizing LLM methods for peer review critique generation and score prediction, including taxonomies, benchmark limitations, domain biases, and robustness risks such as prompt injection.

  12. AI for Auto-Research: Roadmap & User Guide

    cs.AI 2026-05 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    AI can generate research artifacts faster than it can verify them, so across all eight lifecycle stages the credible deployment mode is human-governed collaboration rather than full autonomy.

  13. AI for Auto-Research: Roadmap & User Guide

    cs.AI 2026-05 unverdicted novelty 4.0 of 10

    The paper delivers a stage-by-stage roadmap for AI in research, showing reliable assistance in retrieval and tool tasks but fragility in novelty and judgment, advocating human-governed collaboration.

  14. When Your Reviewer is an LLM: Biases, Divergence, and Prompt Injection Risks in Peer Review

    cs.CY 2025-09 conditional novelty 4.0 of 10

    GPT-5-mini gives weaker papers systematically higher scores than human reviewers, and hidden field-specific prompts in PDFs can force it to assign perfect scores or suppress weaknesses.

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