Pith. sign in

REVIEW 6 cited by

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

Not yet reviewed by Pith; the record is open.

This paper has not been read by Pith yet. Machine review is queued; the pith claim, tier, and objections will appear here once it completes.

SPECIMEN: schema-true, not a live event

T0 review · schema-true

One-sentence machine reading of the paper's core claim.

pith:XXXXXXXX · record.json · timestamp

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
0 comments
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

Discussion (0). Continue with ORCID to comment.

Forward citations

Cited by 6 Pith papers

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

  1. 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).

  2. 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.

  3. ResearchCodeBench: Benchmarking LLMs on Implementing Novel Machine Learning Research Code

    cs.AI 2025-06 conditional novelty 6.0 of 10

    ResearchCodeBench, a 212-task benchmark built from 20 recent ML papers, finds that even the best LLM (Gemini-2.5-Pro-Preview) implements only 37.3% of the weighted code correctly.

  4. GPT Editors, Not Authors: The Stylistic Footprint of LLMs in Academic Preprints

    cs.CL 2025-05 reject novelty 5.0 of 10

    Across 2,408 arXiv preprints, LLM-typical word usage does not cluster in any section, indicating that AI assistance, when used, is uniform rather than limited to specific parts of a paper.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

Pith tools