NeurIPS is one of the big conferences for machine learning. Having your work accepted there is purportedly equivalent to getting a paper published in a top-notch journal in physics (a field that holds big conferences but treats journals as more the venues of record). Today I learned that NeurIPS endorses peer reviewers asking questions to chatbots during the review process. On their FAQ page for reviewers, they include the question

I often use LLMs to help me understand concepts and draft my writing. Can I use LLMs during the review process?

And their response is not shut the fuck up, the worms have reached your brain and we will have to operate. You know, the bare minimum that any decent person would ask for.

You can use resources (e.g. publications on Google Scholar, Wikipedia articles, interactions with LLMs and/or human experts without sharing the paper submissions) to enhance your understanding of certain concepts and to check the grammaticality and phrasing of your written review. Please exercise caution in these cases so you do not accidentally leak confidential information in the process.

“Yeah, go ahead, ask ‘Grok is this true’, but pretty please don’t use the exact words from the paper you are reviewing. We are confident that the same people who turn to a machine to paraphrase their own writing will do so by hand first this time.”

Please remember that you are responsible for the quality and accuracy of your submitted review regardless of any tools, resources, or other help you used to construct the final review.

“Having positioned yourself at the outlet pipe of the bullshit fountain and opened your mouth, please imbibe responsibly.”

Far be it for me to suggest that NeurIPS taking an actually ethical stance about bullshit-fountain technology would call into question the presentations being made there and thus imperil their funding stream. But, I mean, if the shoe fits…