re "disclosing AI use in papers" discussion that re-emerges: please lets not do it as a reviewer or a reader of a paper, i do not care what part of the ideation, research, proof, implementation or writing was done by AI, and how the credit is split between the AI and human author. at the end of the day, humans sign on the resulting paper, and this is all i care about. that they stand behind the text they produced. i don't care if the idea is theirs or came from the AI or is a shared process. i do care that they found it compelling enough to publish. in any case i don't trust the authors to accurately describe how the idea evolved between them and the AI: even if they do try and be honest, i think in most cases its a complex process the author themselves don't fully understand. when i work with a student, i certainly do want them to explain how they used AI and which parts of the work, idea or argument are primarily AI driven. but this is in order to guide and improve the student's work and process, not because i care about the credit assignment. it's part of their training and my mentoring, and should not leak into the final work. the readers and reviewers should not be bothered with it. so please. let just have people submit work without the silly AI disclosures, and be very trigger-happy on rejecting papers that are clear AI slop, or that are hard to evaluate due to what may be improper AI use. (in the short term, we will likely see an increase in conference submissions that have the same idea, coming from different authors having a similar process with a shared AI. i think this will sort itself in the long run by reducing the credit assigned to such works in the community, but in the short term we may want the conference management software to actively look for such similar submission, and maybe review them in bulk)

🚨🚨🚨 #neurips2026

Hello, this is Yanis Varoufakis with a piece of news that would have been hilarious if it weren’t so scary. This morning, two policemen appeared on my doorstep to serve a summons ordering me to the police headquarters to be interrogated by the Greek DEA, our drug busting police department. Not as a witness, expert or not, but as the accused. Accused of what? Shortly after New Year’s, I appeared on a podcast organised by young people to answer their questions on everything that concerns Gen Z today: social media, the meaning of life, their job prospects, what I call technofeudalism etc. At some point, they asked me if I had ever used drugs. Determined not to do a Bill Clinton (remember the laughable “I didn’t inhale”?), I said I had. Apart from pot, I told them, I had one experience of taking ecstasy in Sydney 36 years ago. It was pleasant, I danced for 16 hours effortlessly but then, I added, it gave me a migraine for a week – and so I never used again. That was my introduction to making the point that, however pleasant drug taking may seem, there is a price to pay. And that the ultimate price is dependence, addiction – “the end of liberty”, I said emphatically. Do you see where this is going? Yes, the Greek police have opened an investigation of me under the charge of... aiding and abetting the narco-mafia. [Do me a favour folks: Please don’t tell Trump, OK?] Seriously now, at a time of war, genocide, stupendous exploitation and so on, my little trouble with the inane Greek police is neither here nor there. But it is important. Here, in Europe, many people still live under the illusion that we have liberty, rationality and freedom. We don’t. Dark forces are at work, pushing us into a postmodern version of the Dark Ages. So, beware, people! They are out to take away the last remnants of autonomy and freedom we have left. Resistance is, literally, existence.

Unpopular opinion -- I don't think we should accept papers in top AI conferences whose contribution is mainly experimental but don't provide the data and tools to reproduce the experiments. I have seen several papers with flawed results, but without code there's no way of telling

Exciting day at #INLG2025 in Hanoi! 🇻🇳 Daniel Russo (@russ_eau) and Stefano Menini (@stefano_menini) presented "Face the Facts! Evaluating RAG-based Pipelines for Professional Fact-Checking" 🔗 tinyurl.com/3w8jykhd