First Editorial of 2026: Resisting AI slop

Summary author: Meagan Phelan

2026-01-01

(Press-News.org) The first Editorial of the year at Science always gives the Editor-in-Chief an opportunity to reflect on notable developments for the Science journals. In this Editorial, Holden Thorp focuses on AI, discussing how it “will allow the scientific community to do more if it picks the right ways to use it.” He revisits the journals’ policies and approaches related to AI. The journals do use select AI tools. Over the past year for example, Science has collaborated with DataSeer to evaluate adherence to its policy mandating the sharing of underlying data and code for all published research articles. “The initial results are encouraging in that of 2,680 Science papers published between 2021 and 2024, 69% shared data.” (A related Science Editor’s Blog post provides additional details for the DataSeer project.) But Thorp notes that “although AI is helping Science catch errors that can be corrected or elements that are missing from a paper […] its use and the evaluation of the output require more human effort, not less.” This is because the reports generated by AI tools must be assessed by people. “As a small family of journals that can put more human effort into each paper,” Thorp writes, “the Science journals are less susceptible—and contribute less—to the accumulation of “AI slop” in the literature, but no system, human or artificial, can catch everything. Potential degradation of the literature by technology reinforces the value of a record maintained with human scientific experience and expertise.”

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First Editorial of 2026: Resisting AI slop

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