Looks Like it is Happening…

For a while now I’ve been speculating about what would happen when AI agents started being able to write papers indistinguishable in quality from those that have been typical of the sad state of hep-th for quite a while. Sabine Hossenfelder today has AI Is Bringing “The End of Theory”, in which she gives her cynical take that the past system of grant-holding PIs using grad students/postdocs to produce lots of mediocre papers with the PI’s name on them is about to change dramatically. Once AI agents can produce mediocre papers much more quickly than the grad students/postdocs, then anyone can play and we’ll get flooded by such papers from not just those PIs, but everyone else.

I decided to take a look at the arXiv hep-th submissions, and quickly generated the following numbers, by simple searches using
https://arxiv.org/search/advanced
to find all hep-th submissions in various date ranges.

For 12/1 to 12/31 the numbers were
2022: 634
2023: 684
2024: 780
2025: 1192

For 1/1 to 2/1
2022:583
2023:531
2024:626
2025:659
2026:1,137

For 2/1 to 2/15
2022:299
2023:266
2024:271
2025:333
2026:581

From this very limited data it looks like submission numbers in the last couple months have nearly doubled with respect to the stable numbers of previous years.

I thought about spending more time I don’t have lookng into this, then realized “this is a job for AI!”. Surely an AI agent could do a lot better job than me in gathering such data, figuring out things like whether you can recognize the AI agent papers or not, and writing up a detailed analysis. I’m still resisting learning how to use AI agents, so someone else will have to do this.

One of my main problems with the comments here has been that it’s increasingly hard to tell the difference between human and AI generated ones. In this case, maybe the AI generated ones would be better than those from meatspace. So, unless you have something really substantive (like an explanation for why these numbers don’t mean what it looks like they mean, or know what the arXiv is doing about this) please resist commenting. I’ll moderate comments for things like irrelevance and hallucinations, but won’t delete comments just because they are non-human.