The Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI) received nearly 29,000 paper submissions to its 2026 conference—approximately double the number for the previous year’s edition. These papers were from 75,000 unique authors, and the size of the program committee overseeing peer review tripled to 28,000 members compared to the previous year. A similar trend has been seen in many academic conferences and journals.Scholarly manuscripts seeking to advance the frontier of human knowledge must be peer-reviewed by independent experts before their ideas can enter scholarly discourse. In other words, peer review is the cornerstone of academic research. It is what lends trustworthiness to published science.Since the dawn of digital and then digital-only academic journals in the 1990s, the volume of published peer-reviewed scholarly articles has ballooned. So has the number of articles that get submitted for review at journals and conferences. The latest deluge of submissions, as witnessed by the organizers of the AAAI conference, is coincident with the rapid advancements in large language models (LLMs) with increasingly impressive reasoning and genre-appropriate writing skills.Much peer review is conducted by early-career researchers—primarily graduate students, postdoctoral scholars, and junior professors. In nearly all instances, it is conducted by scholars without monetary compensation, as a voluntary service to their discipline and profession.Given that…

Because you read this