AI Slop and the Collapse of Peer Review
In this episode, we unpack junkification in academic research, and why AI may dramatically accelerate it.
Drawing on a recent 2025 paper by two Australian scholars, Carl Rhodes and Martina Linnenluecke, we examine how publish-or-perish incentives, platform capitalism, and pay-to-publish models are reshaping academic knowledge production. The core claim is not that AI caused the problem, but that AI lowers the marginal cost of producing “good enough” research to near zero, creating conditions where quantity overwhelms quality.
We explore how the explosion of journals, the strain on peer…
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