AI Startups Accused of Exploiting Peer Review for Publicity at ICLR 2025
AI labs face backlash for submitting AI-generated papers to ICLR, sparking peer review ethics debate.
Matilda
AI Startups Accused of Exploiting Peer Review for Publicity at ICLR 2025
There’s a controversy brewing over “AI-generated” studies submitted to this year’s ICLR, a long-running academic conference focused on AI. Image:Zastrozhnov / Getty Images At least three AI labs — Sakana, Intology, and Autoscience — claim to have used AI to generate studies that were accepted to ICLR workshops. At conferences like ICLR, workshop organizers typically review studies for publication in the conference’s workshop track. Sakana informed ICLR leaders before it submitted its AI-generated papers and obtained the peer reviewers’ consent. The other two labs — Intology and Autoscience — did not, an ICLR spokesperson confirmed. Several AI academics took to social media to criticize Intology and Autoscience’s stunts as a co-opting of the scientific peer review process. “All these AI scientist papers are using peer-reviewed venues as their human evals, but no one consented to providing this free labor,” wrote Prithviraj Ammanabrolu, an assistant computer science professor at UC San…
