More Versus Better: Artificial Intelligence, Incentives, and the Emerging Crisis in Peer Review

Summary

An Organization Science editorial by the journal's AI Task Force reporting early evidence on AI's impact on both submissions and reviews at the journal. Submission volume has risen 42% since the late-2022 release of ChatGPT while measured writing quality has declined; AI-generated writing in reviews has also increased and is characterised by lower writing quality and less topical diversity than human-generated writing. The authors describe themselves as the first journal to report these early impacts, but say informal conversations suggest the pattern is widespread.

Contribution

A documented first-mover account from a major social-sciences journal of three concurrent trends — submission inflation, declining submission quality, and the rise of AI-generated reviews — together with the argument that current AI tools, amplified by publish-or-perish incentives, are pushing the peer-review system toward a degraded "more-but-worse" equilibrium.

Method

Editorial; descriptive analysis of the journal's submission and review pipeline.

Relevance to RISE

A canonical citation for the AI-peer-review pillar of RISE: it provides journal-level numbers (the 42% submission rise) that any RISE project building reviewer systems (such as reviewer) must reckon with. Frames the challenge as a quantity-versus-quality equilibrium rather than a pure technology problem.

Critique / open questions

Editorial format — quality measures, identification of "AI-generated" text, and the link to AI rather than other concurrent trends are not methodologically detailed in the excerpt; same-journal evidence limits external validity; no normative recommendation is yet offered.

Key quotes

"Submission volume has risen 42% since the late 2022 release of ChatGPT, while writing quality has declined. The rise in AI-generated writing accounts for nearly all of these trends."

"The current state of AI tools, amplified by existing publish-or-perish incentives, appears to be pushing the system toward an equilibrium" of more but worse output.