Over the past three years, generative artificial intelligence (AI) has had a profound impact on society. AI’s impact on human writing, in particular, has been enormous.

The large language models that power AI tools such as ChatGPT are trained on a wide variety of textual data, and they can now produce complex and high-quality texts of their own.

Most importantly, the widespread use of AI tools has resulted in hyperproduction of so-called “AI slop”: low-quality AI-generated outputs produced with minimal or even no human effort.

Much has been said about what AI writing means for education, work, and culture. But what about science? Does AI improve academic writing, or does it merely produce “scientific AI slop”?

According to a new study by researchers from UC Berkeley and Cornell University, published in Science, the slop is winning.

The researchers analysed abstracts from more than a million preprint articles (publicly available articles yet to undergo peer review)........

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