芝加哥大学商学院教授 Polson 2026年已发表258篇论文引发AI批量写作争议

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# This University of Chicago business school professor has authored 258 academic papers in 2026 (so far).

Posted on [August 27, 2026 9:05 AM](https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2026/08/27/258/ "9:05 am") by [Andrew](https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/author/andrew/ "View all posts by Andrew")

Jeremy Horpedahl tells the story:

Nicholas Polson has, by my count using his SSRN page, already written 258 working papers in 2026 alone. He’s already written (or at least published to SSRN), six papers today, August 26, 2026.

OK, but who am I to talk?—I’ve written over 200 blog posts this year. But wait:

These aren’t just short notes. Most of the papers are of normal academic length: 32 pages, 27 pages, 58 pages. . . . Obviously the research productivity of Polson and his co-author Sokolov is aided by AI. . . . I have seen any academic, at least not in economics, that has really pushed it to the limit.

Horpedahl writes:

Read any single paper, and it feels like just a normal academic paper, the kind of thing that an academic might work on for a few months.

I wanted to see if I shared that judgment so I clicked through to the list of Polson’s papers on SSRN and looked for something interesting . . . ok, here’s something. It’s called Theories of Human Connection, and . . . ulp! It’s 80 pages long. The paper’s subtitle is “An Interdisciplinary Synthesis Across Economics, Psychology, Biology, Philosophy, Game Theory, and Spiritual Tradition.”

But let’s take a look. The abstract on SSRN starts like this:

Human connection is the most studied and least integrated phenomenon in the social sciences. Every discipline that examines intimate relationships captures something real that the others miss, yet no existing framework holds all dimensions in simultaneous view. This book synthesises fourteen thinkers across biology, psychology, economics, game theory, communication theory, existential philosophy, and spiritual tradition into a unified account. Morris established that the need for physical touch is an evolutionary drive as fundamental as hunger, with a biologically ordered sequence of escalating vulnerability whose disruption produces intensity without depth. Bowlby showed how early caregiving creates invisible templates governing adult intimacy, encoded in the nervous system before language exists. Becker revealed that partnerships generate value neither partner could produce alone, but assumed partners are interchangeable — an assumption Frankl demolishes by showing that the meaning generated by shared life cannot be transferred, and that meaning multiplies rather than adds to life satisfaction, explaining widespread disconnection in the wealthiest societies in history. Von Neumann’s game theory explains how mutual self-protective withdrawal, individually rational for each partner, produces the disconnection neither intended. Bateson identifies the communication structure that accelerates this collapse: contradictory demands that make any response wrong. Gottman’s laboratory models predict separation with over ninety percent accuracy from the ratio of positive to negative interactions. The Hindu philosophical tradition adds the final dimension: partnership as a laboratory in which selfishness and fear are progressively revealed and surrendered. We argue that most relationship failures are not failures in one dimension but misidentifications of which dimension is actually in play, and that effective intervention requires the multi-dimensional map this synthesis provides.

From the preface:

The thinkers assembled here — Becker, Bateson, Von Neumann, Schelling, Keynes, Morris, Vaughan, Frankl, Maslow, Gottman, Yogananda, Vivekananda, Maharaj, Polson, Thomas, and Paltrow — did not, for the most part, know each other’s work. They worked in different centuries, different countries, different intellectual traditions. What unites them is that each identified a dimension of human connection that the others left in shadow.

Gottman, huh? The name rings a bell . . . He’s the guy who conned Malcolm Gladwell and various media outlets—maybe he conned himself too—into believing that he could predict divorces with 94% accuracy.

I searched for Gottman in the document and found a whole chapter on that bullshit! You can click through for yourself, it’s chapter 10. Here’s a key bit:

I wonder what prompts were used by Polson and his coauthor to write this article. I guess the prompts did not include, “Evaluate implausible claims skeptically.”

They bring it all together in Chapter 13, “The Cumulative Model: A Unified Theory of Human Connection”:

But let’s not forget “The Master Equation” on page 75:

Jesus Christ. I’ve heard that Cambridge University has an open position in their school of education . . . this kind of thing would fit in very well there, no?

In all seriousness, no, I don’t think this “feels like just a normal academic paper, the kind of thing that an academic might work on for a few months.” At least, not the sort of thing a non-bullshitting academic might write.

I know Nick Polson—he’s a statistician, and he’s done lots of solid work over the years! What happened here?

Here are a few possibilities:

1. It’s an experiment or a joke. But if it were a joke I’d think there’d be some internal clues, no? It’s hard to imagine playing the whole thing straight. And if it were an experiment, I’d expect they’d all read like straight-up statistics papers, nothing so obviously bogus as “Theories of Human Connection.”

2. Someone else is impersonating Polson. Seems unlikely, but it’s possible. It might not even be personal. Maybe all this _is_ an experiment, not by Nick but by someone else who programmed a chatbot to choose the name of a successful academic and then spew the internet with papers attributed to him. If so, how horrible.

3. “Intellectual squatting.” That’s the conjecture of Michael Makowsky, who writes:

The nice version is it’s putting out a series of half-baked papers in the hopes of establishing a property right to the underlying ideas at an earlier stage of the research process than previously possible. The less generous interpretation is it’s dumping a series of haystacks on the plains and laying claim to the needles probabilistically within each.

I guess . . . but what does Nick ultimately get out of it? Invitations to speak at more conferences?? I don’t get it.

Makowsky writes:

Imagine you are a person who has highly esoteric, potentially important ideas every day. Many of those ideas you suspect, based on some combination of experience and ego, are new in at least one dimension. You would like to get credit for that newness. For being first. What’s the problem? The problem is that scholarship remains more perspiration than inspiration. Having a new idea is great, but it takes years to work through the nuance in sufficient detail that you can convince your peers of the coherence and originality of the contribution. During the minutes each day you are not working on this singular project you have the inspiration for other ideas, sometimes multiple within a single day. How frustrating is the proposition that someone else gets credit for the originality of contribution just because they had time to reveal it to the world while you were embroiled in your investigation of what is only one of your many score ideas!? Ah, but meta-level inspiration has struck you! What if you took each one of those ideas, spent an hour curating a series of prompts around it, and then let Chat GPT (or another LLM) fabricate an entire research paper around it? . . .

But . . . that’s what blogging’s all about! Often when I have an idea or a reaction, I blog it. No need to pipe it through a chatbot; I’ll just save the cycles and post it right here.

To return to the 256 working papers, I can think of one more motivation:

4. Education. This seems like the most plausible explanation to me. Polson has had an active research and teaching career, and he’d like to share his insights with a broader audience than the readers of his published papers and the students at the University of Chicago business school. And one way to reach people is . . . econ preprints! So Nick picks 258 interesting topics, writes some prompts for each, and produces the articles. I guess he’s programmed a bot to do this. He just feeds it the prompts and the bot writes the paper and posts it directly to SSRN.

That could explain the mystery of how that ridiculous 80-page article with “The Cumulative Model: A Unified Theory of Human Connection” (shades of Stephen Wolfram!) ended up there. Not only can’t you expect an author to write 258 articles of that length in less than a year, you can’t expect him to read all of them too. The content of that bizarre article could be as much a surprise to Polson as it was to me.

This then raises a question: setting aside the motivations of Polson (or his impersonator), do these 258 papers have any value?

It’s hard for me to answer this question, given that I’ve only looked at one of them. My guess is that the net value of the papers is negative, in that the amount of time that people (including me) have wasted going through them outweighs any positive contributions that might have been there.

My suggestion

Here’s what Nick could do on this, which _could_ have value: Take these 258 prompts and write an article (himself, not using the chatbot) explaining why he thinks these ideas are important. Aki and I wrote a paper a few years ago, What are the most important statistical ideas of the past 50 years?. Nick could write something similar: What are the 258 most important things in statistics to learn today? Or something like that. I’m not saying it would be easy—it would take more effort than programming a chatbot to spam SSRN—but valuable products often take work to produce. Nick has tenure and could set aside the time to do it.

Also I’d recommend withdrawing all those papers from SSRN. Withdrawing 258 papers seems like a lot of work, but I’m sure he could easily program a bot to do the job.

P.S. There’s a further twist: there are two accounts for Nicholas or Nick Polson at the University of Chicago business school; see this comment thread. This would seem to be consistent with the “social experiment” hypothesis (if Nick decided to set up a separate account to play around with) or the “impersonation” hypothesis (if the bot that wrote and posted these papers was not created by Nick at all). The whole thing remains a mystery to me.

P.P.S. OK, I did a bit more nosing around.

SSRN allows you to list the papers in time order. If you go to Nick’s SSRN page linked from his website, you’ll see 16 papers, with the first (“The Impact of Jumps in Volatility and Returns”) being posted on 1 Jan 2001, then others through the next two decades, with the most recent being “Deep Learning in Characteristics-Sorted Factor Models,” posted on 23 Sep 2018 and last revised 26 Jun 2023.

If you go to the SSRN page with all the fake papers, it starts with “Kramnik vs Nakamura or Bayes vs p-value,” posted 7 Dec 2023. It’s a badly written paper—I’m guessing not AI, just text by a non-English-speaking author that was not ever checked by native speakers before posting. This rings a bell . . . I actually have a blog post on this paper, scheduled to appear next year. Next on the list is a 25-page paper, “AI and Vivekananda,” posted 5 Mar 2024, then a gap of two years until another AI-related paper appeared on 9 Mar 2026, then on 11 Mar 2026 came the aforementioned “Theories of Human Connection.”

So, yes, Polson has two SSRN pages, but they have no overlap in time. He also has papers on Arxiv, including the intriguingly-titled “Bayes with No Shame: Admissibility Geometries of Predictive Inference,” dated 24 Aug 2026 . . . Hey, that’s just 3 days ago! Oddly enough, I can’t find this one on SSRN.

But what about the article itself? I don’t have the patience to read it, but I did catch that it mentions the martingale property, which is one of my current interests—that’s cool. But, just flipping through, it looks much more substantive—much more like a real scientific paper—than that horrible “Theories of Human Connection” thing. This could be a tribute to the power of modern chatbots to create something so convincing.

P.P.P.S. Update here: The incredible shrinking SSRN page.

P.P.P.P.S. Vadim Sokolov, coauthor of several of the chatbot-assisted papers, comments here. Assuming this comment itself is legitimate, those 258 papers were not an experiment or a hoax, nor was there any impersonator, nor was it intellectual squatting. Rather, Polson and his coauthors just had 258 different things to say, and they felt the best way to do so was using a chatbot to write tens of thousands of words on these topics.

Also, according to Sokolov, they did not program a bot to do this. He reports that at least one of the papers went through multiple rounds of review, so even if a chatbot was involved in that one, the human contribution was much more than inserting a prompt. He says that some of the papers “are much newer and were developed with much more extensive AI assistance. Modern AI made it possible to develop and complete this material at a speed that would previously have been impossible.”

The fallacy in this statement by Sokolov is the idea that using a chatbot to turn a few hundred words of prompts into ten thousand words of text is a way to “complete this material.” Nothing’s being “completed” here in any intellectual sense; the process just adds pages and pages of froth. I think that Josh’s analogy of this to the Sorcerer’s Apprentice is apt.

P.P.P.P.P.S. Polson appears to think he’s proved the Riemann hypothesis (see comments here and here). I would think this would cause some concern among his collaborators.

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101 thoughts on “This University of Chicago business school professor has authored 258 academic papers in 2026 (so far).”

1. David Bartram on August 27, 2026 9:36 AM at 9:36 amsaid: A post about 258 papers with negative utility has positive value for me: if this guy submits any papers to my journal I’ll know not to spend any time on them. In all seriousness: crap like this can only clog up the system. What should follow is all penalty, no reward. Reply ↓
* Rahul on August 28, 2026 2:11 AM at 2:11 amsaid: I love AI. The early impact of AI is on many processes and institutions which were losing their utility anyways. AI and LLMs just reveal how pointless publishing has become (other than a currency for academic credentials)

I would love AI to be the straw that breaks the camels back for the academic publishing enterprise. I think such AI related papers will increase to the point where it poisons the well. The average quality of a publication was down anyways and AI might be just what we need to get rid of this conventional model.

First I heard complaints about authors using AI. Then reviewers and editors. Ultimately where’s the human in the loop? Presumably in the future people will get their answers by asking AI instead of reading papers anyways. Reply ↓
* Dale Lehman on August 28, 2026 6:50 AM at 6:50 amsaid: I agree and I think your comment applies quite widely. Teaching has been thrown into turmoil – how to evaluate student work and insure it was theirs? So much of what we did was broken that AI is exposing all the faults. AI is not the problem, it is the canary in the mine. This doesn’t mean that AI isn’t dangerous, but I think most of the things people focus on are problems overdue to be addressed. To take another: AI threatens to undermine democratic processes – so much misinformation, false videos, messages designed to take advantage of AI ‘capabilities.’ These are real problems, but the democratic process (in the US, at least) was already broken. So much reliance on donations, so much special interest money, and our 2 party oligopoly make a mockery of representative democracy. AI makes all of this worse, but it was already bad. Reply ↓

2. jd on August 27, 2026 9:43 AM at 9:43 amsaid: If you know him, then why not ask him? Reply ↓
* Andrew on August 27, 2026 9:59 AM at 9:59 amsaid: Jd:

I don’t know him well. It’s been several years since I’ve talked with him or interacted with him in any way, and it seemed awkward to ask him. I guess I could’ve just shot him a quick email with a “Whassup with that?” Reply ↓
* Anonymous on August 27, 2026 11:42 AM at 11:42 amsaid: Less awkward than writing a public blog post about him? Reply ↓

3. JFA on August 27, 2026 9:45 AM at 9:45 amsaid: “In all seriousness, no, I don’t think this “feels like just a normal academic paper, the kind of thing that an academic might work on for a few months.” At least, not the sort of thing a non-bullshitting academic might write.”

I don’t know Andrew. I’ve seen some pretty atrocious academic work written by seemingly sincere academics that is of equivalent quality to what I’ve sampled of Polson’s AI generated work. I’d hate to pick on the humanities and the softer social sciences (anthropology, some psych stuff, sociology)… god knows econ, poli sci, and even some things from the harder sciences are not great… but there are entire academic fields where what Andrew quoted would be perfectly adequate or maybe even top notch output. Reply ↓
* Bucky on September 23, 2026 2:41 PM at 2:41 pmsaid: Please no Sokal hoax 2.0 cope session. There is a near zero percent chance that what was quoted would be “perfectly adequate or maybe even top notch output” in the humanities and “softer” social sciences. As if the part and the whole can be disassociated in actually empirical or critical scholarship. The fact you typed that out seriously and hit send is prima facie evidence of your complete and total ignorance. Please go find a well-regarded (i.e., not a predatory or vanity) journal that has anything of the sort. Just because you disagree with an interpretation or the words ruffle your shallow aesthetico-political feathers does not mean the underlying scholarship is bad. Language is representative and symbolic. Your opinion is an illusion of writing itself. You see AI writing posing as real writing and you fill in the remaining negative space with your evident pre-baked resentments and unadulterated ignorance (i.e., emotions and lack of expertise) and say “perfectly adequate or maybe even top notch output” for X and Y fields I evidently don’t respect. Reply ↓
* Andrew on September 23, 2026 4:06 PM at 4:06 pmsaid: I agree with Bucky on this one. The particular paper I read is less like an academic paper and more like a piece of outsider art, some big theory of everything with a lot of waving toward big ideas. Reply ↓
* Jukka on September 29, 2026 4:06 PM at 4:06 pmsaid: “some big theory of everything”

You love this diamond I found a few months ago:

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1281421.1281430 Reply ↓

4. Dale Lehman on August 27, 2026 9:48 AM at 9:48 amsaid: I go with number 1. His own website doesn’t raise any red flags and he has a long history of published research. Without speaking to its quality, the impossible volume of manuscripts in the last year looks like an experiment to see what AI does to academic research. I wouldn’t call it a joke since I think the impacts are serious business. But I can’t see how any human can average more than one (fairly detailed) paper per day. Even with my poor sleep habits it seems physically impossible without using AI. And I can’t imagine that he is thinking that his reputation or career will be enhanced by inundating his resume with this stuff. I vote for experiment. Reply ↓
* Andrew on August 27, 2026 10:01 AM at 10:01 amsaid: Dale:

I agree that “experiment” is a likely possibility: once the bot is set up to write papers and post them automatically, why not just set it to submit hundreds of them at once? It’s not clear to me what’s being tested in such an experiment, but maybe that’s the point. I guess we’ll find out soon.

I will say that, if it is an experiment, props to Nick for putting himself out there, in the same way that authors of autofiction risk embarrassing themselves in order to convey a larger truth. Reply ↓
* 9P on August 27, 2026 11:39 AM at 11:39 amsaid: I’m wondering if this is a Sokol-esque play to see how far one can get with crap research in an effort to expose it. I can’t tell if this is actually a likely possibility or if I’m just coping because I quite like Polson’s previous work. Reply ↓
* Josh Halpern on August 28, 2026 1:48 AM at 1:48 amsaid: Think the sorcerers apprentice.
* Andrew on August 28, 2026 7:06 AM at 7:06 amsaid: Josh:

Based on the comment by Sokolov in this thread, I’m thinking that your Sorcerer’s Apprentice theory might be right. Polson and his collaborators got a hold of this powerful tool and couldn’t let go.

anon on August 27, 2026 12:00 PM at 12:00 pmsaid: re: red flags

He posted a 10 page proof of the Riemann Hypothesis way back in 2017 to math.GM (https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.02653) with a long revision history (and a retraction? in the Brazilian Journal of Probability and Statistics) that goes up to July of this year. Seems suspicious, even if this is his (very strange) idea of a fun prank or something. IMO it feels like a undercurrent of crankery has gotten amplified by LLMs even though he’s clearly a serious and competent researcher in (non-RH) areas. Reply ↓
* Nils Lid Hjort on August 29, 2026 4:46 PM at 4:46 pmsaid: Having an arXiv paper by a serious & established (& productive) scholar with *23 revisions* (from Aug 2017 to July 2026) isn’t a “fun prank” or in the crankery department. There’s also a 34-minute YouTube (from 2021?) where Polson appears to go through lots of details, slowly and carefully, from his office. Given the local atmosphere of these threads, it’s fair to mention that this is clearly in the “before AI” domain. At the end of the video (which I haven’t attempted to follow, I’ve just been skimming) he thanks very specifically and warmly long-time collaboration (and discussions and mailing) with Lennart Bondesson (Swedish gentleman, passed away 2024 at age 80, specialist on infinite divisible distributions & lots more). I knew Lennart a bit (editor of the Scandinavian Journal of Statistics etc.), and would have very much liked to discuss these themes with him (!).

My prior for the RH is (a) Polson has given this his best, over many years, and this is not “merely AI tinkering”; (b) he is onto *something* of interest; and (c) this can’t yet be RH (which would have mathematicians waltzing in the streets and given him an instant Abel Prize). So I hope specialists give that July 2026 arXiv paper a fair and strong reading, helping a wider community to understand & assess (b) and (c). Reply ↓

5. Anoneuoid on August 27, 2026 10:00 AM at 10:00 amsaid: The literature was already like this, you should already be assuming its 99.99% junk.

People have to figure out its independent replication and surprising predictions that matter. Using lots of big words and esoteric symbols is not a good proxy. In fact accessible jargon and shorter documents are better heuristics.

The astronomers say there is a lunar eclipse tonight, and Im confident I can look up in the sky to see it myself without even knowing how to read. *That* is the indication of good science. Reply ↓
6. Raghu Parthasarathy on August 27, 2026 10:22 AM at 10:22 amsaid: This is more depressing than most AI misuse stories. And the 13-dimensional mathematical “model” is hilariously stupid, regardless of whether it was devised by man or machine. I share your puzzlement about why anyone would churn out this flood of AI-generated articles. Of your proposed explanations:

1. (A joke / experiment) I don’t think so, for the reasons you gave. But it’s plausible. I hope this is the reason!
2. (impersonation) No; I’m sure he would have posted a statement by now.
3. (squatting) — plausible, but see below.
4. (education) I don’t see how Polson would think that these papers have educational value, or even if they did, that simply pointing students to them would aid their learning. (It’s not like there’s a shortage of papers out there.)

Two other possibilities:

5. Delusion. Given that AI tools are brilliant at so many things, Polson has come to believe that they are brilliant at everything, and all these papers describe true great insights into economics (or whatever field idiodic scientism about 13-dimensional behavior models fits into). He thinks his prompts have led to over 200 breakthroughs.

6, or 3b. I think the “squatting” hypothesis makes the most sense, but not with the aim of getting conference invitations, but of filling the future AI training data with himself. As Tyler Cowen sometimes annoyingly writes, he’s writing for the AIs. Scraping the SSRN pages, the models will find a prolific Nicholas Polson, who can’t be ignored simply by reason of volume if some hapless student is seeking to learn about 21st century business (?) thinking. Polson will be immortal, like the deadbeat fathers of 20 children who, almost by definition, are more biologically fit than those of us with just a few. Reply ↓
* Matt Skaggs on August 27, 2026 11:10 AM at 11:10 amsaid: “the [chatbot] models will find a prolific Nicholas Polson, who can’t be ignored simply by reason of volume”

That has to be it! He’s getting in on the proverbial ground floor. Since chatbots also feed on their own tail, his importance could grow exponentially over time.

Which begs the question: at what point do chatbot citations get considered in tenure review? Users posed prompts on things they care about that resulted in your papers being cited 6,000 times last year, that’s gotta mean something, right? And heck, why stop there? Let’s rate university departments by how many chatbot citations their professors garner.

People tell me I need to flag my sarcasm. The previous paragraph was sarcasm! Unfortunately, it is painfully close to the various Red Queen dilemmas that have already formed around AI. Reply ↓
* Lahvak on August 27, 2026 11:27 AM at 11:27 amsaid: One problem with this strategy: all those papers are in public domain. Reply ↓
* Gregory C. Mayer on August 27, 2026 11:38 AM at 11:38 amsaid: No; copyright is retained:

License Information

The copyright holder has granted SSRN a license. All rights reserved. No reuse allowed without permission.
* Lahvak on August 27, 2026 2:01 PM at 2:01 pmsaid: There is no copyright holder, assuming the papers were indeed AI generated.
* Daniel Lakeland on August 27, 2026 11:03 PM at 11:03 pmsaid: To be clear for those who aren’t familiar. Its far from established about AI, but precedent says that there must be a substantial input from an actual human in order for a work to be copyrightable. If the work is basically AI generated then it isnt copyrightable and so the supposed copyright licensed to SSRI simply doesnt exist.

It’ll take some kind of court cases to fully establish this but I think its safe to say that the precedent is strongly against the idea of a chatbot generated work being copyrightable unless someone sat there prompting for individual paragraphs and then rewriting them and soforth… where theres substantial human input.

9P on August 27, 2026 11:37 AM at 11:37 amsaid: I can’t tell if you’re being entirely serious (you only noted that the second-to-last paragraph was sarcastic), but as Andrew noted, Polson was already a relatively well-known and respected statistician – he was well beyond the “ground floor” by this point. I have no idea why he would do this.

I’ve read a fair bit of his work myself over the years. This is a super disappointing thing to read. Reply ↓
* timber on September 27, 2026 2:21 PM at 2:21 pmsaid: Not really, because future AI will be even smarter, and will instantly recognize the diluted and salami-sliced nature of the “papers” Reply ↓

Raghu Parthasarathy on August 27, 2026 12:24 PM at 12:24 pmsaid: If it’s #2 (someone is impersonating Polson), hopefully he’s working on squashing this! (Also: what does the impersonator gain?) Reply ↓
* Anonymous on August 27, 2026 11:25 PM at 11:25 pmsaid: Maybe they want to hurt/sabotage him specifically? Reply ↓

7. Peter Hull on August 27, 2026 10:47 AM at 10:47 amsaid: I dub this a “Polson process” Reply ↓
* Chris on August 27, 2026 2:31 PM at 2:31 pmsaid: A “Polson Distribution”? Reply ↓

8. Kaiser on August 27, 2026 10:47 AM at 10:47 amsaid: The answer is #2. Here is his real SSRN page (linked to from his UChicago home page): it lists 16 papers.

I guess there is still a possibility that he made the fake page himself as an experiment. Reply ↓
* Andrew on August 27, 2026 12:13 PM at 12:13 pmsaid: Interesting. The next question is, if someone is impersonating Polson, why? Some bizarre practical joke? Whatever the motivation, it seems likely that the papers were written as well as posted by a bot, no?

I have no idea what it means for someone to have two different SSRN pages.

Here’s the one with the fake papers:

Here’s the one with the real papers:

He’s Nicholas in the fake profile and Nick in the real one. Reply ↓
* IMK on August 27, 2026 12:30 PM at 12:30 pmsaid: This was my finding too. After reading the post, I looked the guy up and quickly found the inconsistency in the two SSRN profiles. So, why didn’t Jeremy Horpedahl find this? What does he mean when he writes that “he just discovered an economist…?” No one checks these things anymore? Reply ↓
* Andrew on August 27, 2026 12:48 PM at 12:48 pmsaid: I dunno, it’s a mystery for sure why there are two profiles. This is consistent with the “social experiment” hypothesis and also the “impersonation” hypothesis.

Matt Skaggs on August 27, 2026 12:47 PM at 12:47 pmsaid: “it seems likely that the papers were written as well as posted by a bot”

This. I liked Raghu’s theory, but then I asked Bing Copilot what was going on, and it agrees with Kaiser. No chance all this came from the same researcher. It offered possible explanations, the most like of which was “An AI‑assisted mass‑posting pipeline using [Polson’s] identity.” Reply ↓
* Kaiser on August 27, 2026 3:43 PM at 3:43 pmsaid: I wrote this up here: https://www.junkcharts.com/what-can-one-believe/

Since it’s a statistics blog, we should note that the red flag is the citation to downloads ratio on the “fake” page.

9. Eric Bennett Rasmusen on August 27, 2026 10:50 AM at 10:50 amsaid: My guess is that Polson’s having fun, or “an experiment” if you like. These are just working papers, so far. How many will get published? A very interesting question. What fields will publish AI papers? Can Polson create a record worthy of simultaneous chairs in sociology, English, and education? Can some of these papers get published in econ journals? Will they get cited? Reply ↓
10. ST on August 27, 2026 10:58 AM at 10:58 amsaid: The SSRN profile page linked from his webpage (https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=22857) seems to be different from the one you posted. Supports the impersonation hypothesis. Reply ↓
11. DC on August 27, 2026 11:43 AM at 11:43 amsaid: FWIW: Polson has a (purported) 10 page proof of the Riemann Hypothesis posted to math.GM dating back to 2017, way before LLMs hit the scene (https://arxiv.org/abs/1708.02653) that he seems to still update (last revision this July) and take seriously; this personally moves my posterior quite a bit towards some amount of crankery amplified by LLM assistance, even though he seems to be a serious researcher and mathematically competent in other research areas. (Unless this is of course also just a prank, in which case he got me :)) Reply ↓
12. Dmitri on August 27, 2026 11:57 AM at 11:57 amsaid: I wonder if the papers have some nonobvious feature that we are missing. For instance, they might cite one another, with the whole project being an experiment on citation networks. Or perhaps they have some non-obvious watermark (e.g. some unlikely turn of phrase or something), and he is going to see if one can find evidence that they have been devoured by future AI models. This kind of thing might justify dumping 258 papers onto the internet. Reply ↓
13. Jeff Helzner on August 27, 2026 12:24 PM at 12:24 pmsaid: His presentation of “the cumulative model” reminds me of that Ali G episode where Sacha Baron Cohen pitches his hoverboard idea to a potential investor. Reply ↓
14. Anon on August 27, 2026 12:33 PM at 12:33 pmsaid: From the post:
”Jesus Christ. I’ve heard that Cambridge University has an open position in their school of education . . . ”

This is an absolutely disgusting joke to make about someone who was hounded into suicide. Reply ↓
* Anon on August 27, 2026 12:50 PM at 12:50 pmsaid: I agree. Please don’t do that. Reply ↓
* Anon on August 27, 2026 12:55 PM at 12:55 pmsaid: I stumbled over this as well. Disgusting. Reply ↓

Andrew on August 27, 2026 12:52 PM at 12:52 pmsaid: Anon:

I’m sad that this Cambridge University professor fabricated his research, I’m sad that Cambridge hired him without realizing the problem, I’m that they hired a law firm to intimidate the press from reporting about it and that they paid people to lie about, I’m sad that all this came tumbling down so quickly on the person, and I’m saddest of all that he killed himself. Sometimes I joke about things that make me sad. Reply ↓
* Anon on August 27, 2026 2:52 PM at 2:52 pmsaid: Your “sadness” does not excuse you from treating others with basic human decency. Reply ↓
* Andrew on August 27, 2026 3:01 PM at 3:01 pmsaid: Anon:

I hope you’re posting comments on the Cambridge University website because I don’t think the Cambridge University executives treated their students with basic human decency when they hired an unqualified professor, I don’t think they treated those journalists with basic human decency when they sicced an evil law firm on them, I don’t think they treated their public relations staff with basic human decency when they instructed them to lie in public, and I don’t think they treated Jason Arday with basic human decency by treating him like some sort of publicity object and leaving him to hang out to dry rather than at least trying to walk him down from his fabrications. The well-paid executives at Cambridge University profited from a series of lies, and they were willing to sacrifice the education of their students and the integrity and welfare of their employees in a years-long attempt to keep the bubble from bursting. That makes me sad. And angry. I will also sometimes joke about such things. Joking about it doesn’t make me less sad or angry; it just provides me with another route into the problem.
* Will on August 27, 2026 3:22 PM at 3:22 pmsaid: Basic human decency also does not excuse you from callously dismissing Andrew’s sadness and his choice of how to express it.
* M on August 28, 2026 6:05 AM at 6:05 amsaid: What does “basic human decency” mean?
Is your thought policing treating people with basic human decency?
* ProfXZ on August 30, 2026 12:01 AM at 12:01 amsaid: The joke was about Cambridge’s willingness to hire fabulists and only about Arday in an unmentioned and tangential way. If the Arday fabrications and Cambridge’s complicity had come to light and Arday were still on faculty, the joke would be the same, conditional on there being an active search. Similarly, had Arday been dismissed but not committed suicide, the joke also works.

You seem to have taken the entire thing as a joke about Arday dying, which it was not. The humor was: (A) Paper is nonsense; (B) Cambridge School of Ed willing to hire, promote, and defend obvious and ridiculous fabricated claims and nonsense —> (C) they would be willing to hire someone who wrote a paper like (A).

However, no joke is funny if it needs to be explained. Not sure that anyone else needed the explanation, and I doubt you’ll find it funny even with the explanation.

M on August 27, 2026 11:59 PM at 11:59 pmsaid: Who was hounded into suicide? Not Arday, as he decided to kill himself when the jig was up instead of being held accountable for his lies and fraud. Reply ↓

15. Dennie on August 27, 2026 12:40 PM at 12:40 pmsaid: Are we sure it is the real Polson? His Chicago booth page links to another SSRN account with only 16 papers on it in total…

Booth page: https://www.chicagobooth.edu/faculty/directory/p/nicholas-polson
SSRN it links to: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/cf_dev/AbsByAuth.cfm?per_id=22857 Reply ↓
16. John N-G on August 27, 2026 1:13 PM at 1:13 pmsaid: Curious, I decided to google myself. Google responded with:

AI Overview
University of Chicago Booth School of Business professor Nicholas G. Polson has published an extraordinary volume of over 250 working papers on SSRN in 2026 alone.

Yep, that’s an AI overview, all right! Reply ↓
* John N-G on August 27, 2026 1:15 PM at 1:15 pmsaid: That was “google ssrn polson myself”. I put angled brackets around the search term and the blog comments editor went ahead and ate the search term. Reply ↓
* Kaiser on August 27, 2026 3:41 PM at 3:41 pmsaid: This calls for more AI to fix the problem :) Reply ↓

17. Jessica Hullman on August 27, 2026 2:47 PM at 2:47 pmsaid: Just a slightly more extreme case of what many AI/ML researchers are up to these days. Reply ↓
18. Anonymous on August 27, 2026 2:55 PM at 2:55 pmsaid: Polson has co-authors listed on many of the 256 papers. I am aware that at least one of these co-authors has requested that his name be removed as a co-author, which suggests to me that this person knows this is not an experiment. To add to the 6 hypotheses offered in explanation, I suggest another possibility: AI addiction at a scale heretofore unseen. Reply ↓
* Anonymous on August 27, 2026 3:12 PM at 3:12 pmsaid: If that is the case, then this is far more serious than personal AI addiction, and verges on research misconduct. Nobody needs to “request” their names to be removed after posting to a preprint server. If any co-authors have reservations, the preprint should not be posted, to begin with. Reply ↓

19. Vadim Sokolov on August 27, 2026 11:56 PM at 11:56 pmsaid: Andrew,

I am Vadim Sokolov, coauthor of Theories of Human Connection and several other papers discussed in this post.

There is one substantive criticism in your post that I think is fair. Our discussion of Gottman repeats the reported claim that relationship outcomes could be predicted with accuracy above 90%. Gottman and Levenson reported 93% accuracy in a peer-reviewed paper, and related results have been published and widely discussed in the relationship literature. We were not aware at the time of the important methodological criticism concerning cross-validation and out-of-sample prediction. Having now reviewed that literature, we agree that our statement requires qualification, and we will correct it. But the rest of your post goes far beyond that and there a gap between the evidence you collected and the conclusions you published.

From one paper you speculate about a bot autonomously producing and uploading papers, authors not knowing what is in their own work, “intellectual squatting,” and even impersonation. You then estimate that the net scientific value of the entire collection is negative.

In your subsequent update you go further and refer to the SSRN page as containing “all the fake papers.”

That characterization is false. You are entirely entitled to think Theories of Human Connection is a bad paper or to think the “Master Equation” is silly. Neither establishes that the papers are fake.

In fact, one of these papers, Kramnik vs. Nakamura: A Chess Scandal (that you also mentioned), went through multiple rounds of referee review and revision before being published in CHANCE, a peer-reviewed American Statistical Association publication. It is a concrete example of why describing the entire collection as “fake papers” is simply not an evidence-based characterization.

These are genuine preprints produced and posted by the named researchers. The SSRN account was not an impersonation. Some of these papers may contain errors. They are preprints, and we certainly do not claim that hundreds of manuscripts produced across different subjects and at different stages of development are all error-free or equally good. But an erroneous or imperfect preprint is not a “fake paper.”

Nor did these projects suddenly materialize from a magical “chatbot” in 2026. Many grew from ideas, research notes, mathematical work, computational experiments, lecture material, and partial drafts developed over many years. Some are much newer and were developed with much more extensive AI assistance. Modern AI made it possible to develop and complete this material at a speed that would previously have been impossible. The collection is heterogeneous both in provenance and in the role AI played.

You have known Nick professionally for years. You could have asked him about those facts!

Indeed, later in your own post, when you briefly inspect “Bayes with No Shame”, you say that it looks “much more substantive” and “much more like a real scientific paper”, while also saying that you do not have the patience to read it. That should itself suggest the danger of treating hundreds of heterogeneous manuscripts as though they had already been evaluated.

The progression here is striking:

A claim in one preprint was inadequately qualified.

Therefore the paper is “bullshit.”

Therefore perhaps the authors did not read their papers.

Perhaps a bot generated and uploaded them autonomously.

Perhaps somebody was impersonating Nick.

Perhaps the entire corpus has negative value.

And then: “all the fake papers.”

Your blog is one of the most widely read in statistics. Statements by an influential scholar characterizing another researcher’s work as “fake” have consequences. Your own comment section already illustrates this: one commenter says that if Nick submits work to his journal, he now knows not to spend time on it. Shortly after these posts appeared, SSRN also removed our accounts and papers (although, might not be related to your post). But the sequence illustrates why precision matters when making serious public claims about other researchers. “I found a problem in this preprint” and “these are all fake papers” are fundamentally different claims.

Vadim Sokolov Reply ↓
* Andrew on August 28, 2026 7:02 AM at 7:02 amsaid: Vadim:

Thanks for the info. Here’s the key bit I gather from your comment:

Many grew from ideas, research notes, mathematical work, computational experiments, lecture material, and partial drafts developed over many years. Some are much newer and were developed with much more extensive AI assistance. Modern AI made it possible to develop and complete this material at a speed that would previously have been impossible. The collection is heterogeneous both in provenance and in the role AI played.

I guess that “Some are much newer and were developed with much more extensive AI assistance” applies to most of the 258 papers. It’s hard to know since I didn’t see anything in the papers noting the initial prompts, acknowledging the chatbot contributions, etc.

Given all this, I stand by my recommendation in the above post;

Nick should take these 258 prompts and write an article (himself, not using the chatbot) explaining why he thinks these ideas are important. Aki and I wrote a paper a few years ago, What are the most important statistical ideas of the past 50 years?. Nick could write something similar: What are the 258 most important things in statistics to learn today? Or something like that. I’m not saying it would be easy—it would take more effort than programming a chatbot to spam SSRN—but valuable products often take work to produce. Nick has tenure and could set aside the time to do it.

Regarding my labeling of the papers as “fake”: I do think that if you stick in some prompts, tell a chatbot to write a 30-page paper on the topic, and then label it as your own writing without acknowledgement, that’s fake. Nobody’s out there legitimately writing 258 papers in a single year. Someone can have 258 original ideas in a year—that’s no problem at all—and that’s why I suggest that the real contribution could be made by the single article listing and discussing the ideas.

I found it hard to believe that human would have read those 258 articles from beginning to end, even its named authors. What is that—10,000 words of computer-generated text? I guess it’s possible.

Finally, let me emphasize that:

1. I appreciate your commenting on this post and sharing your perspective.

2. I sincerely recommend you and your colleagues follow my suggestion and work out the ideas you find interesting and write them up in your own words, rather than producing thousands of pages of chatbot output which will be difficult for anyone to go through. Reply ↓
* Shiva Maharaj on August 28, 2026 11:43 AM at 11:43 amsaid: Andrew, you have been instrumental in removing academic research. Then gloating about it. Why not analyze every paper? Too busy writing a blog? If you’re too busy or lazy to analyze then leave it for others who want to read, analyze, criticize and improve etc. Guessing you think that you are the king of statistics by writing a silly blog? Your dean needs to know about your petty behavior. Reply ↓
* Andrew on August 28, 2026 2:08 PM at 2:08 pmsaid: Shiva:

Take it up with SSRN, not me. I’m not the one who took the papers down, and I’m not even the one who noticed them in the first place.

If you want you can post these papers on a preprint server somewhere else, or just post on your own website. If you give me the link, I’d be happy to share it here so that people who want to read those 258 papers can feel free to do so. I don’t want to stop anyone from reading these papers, or analyzing them, or improving them, or putting them into chatbots to great 2580 more papers, or whatever. Let 25800 flowers bloom!

And, no, I don’t think I’m “the king of statistics.” Statistics has no king. If, like me, you feel you have contributions you can make to statistics that are best expressed informally as blog posts rather than research articles, you should feel free to start your own blog.

Andy on September 23, 2026 8:51 PM at 8:51 pmsaid: I do wonder whether Sokolov’s post was written with AI… Reply ↓

AAAnonymous on August 28, 2026 7:28 AM at 7:28 amsaid: Quote from above: “Shortly after these posts appeared, SSRN also removed our accounts and papers (although, might not be related to your post).”

I assume SSRN has some rules concerning multiple accounts for one person, etc. which might explain why (some of?) the accounts were removed. If there was an original, older, account on SSRN from one or more researchers involved that might explain the actions of SSRN.

Multiple accounts for a single person may also help explain why people speculated about the possible fakeness of the new account, which in combination with the extraordinary amount of published papers might be considered to be a valid and useful thing to wonder about and consider.

I could also find the following in the terms of use of SSRN which might possibly be relevant here, or may help explain the actions of SSRN:

“Each registration is for a single individual only, unless specifically designated otherwise on the registration page. Elsevier does not permit a) anyone other than you to use the sections requiring registration by using your name and password; or b) access through a single name being made available to multiple users on a network or otherwise.” Reply ↓
* Andrew on August 28, 2026 7:42 AM at 7:42 amsaid: Vadim:

Let me say just one more thing here. If you and Nick have ideas you want to share, that’s great. If you think that the best way to do this is to use chatbots to produce 258 papers with tens of thousands of pages of text, that’s your call—although I do think the responsible thing here would be to have a footnote on page 1 of each paper explaining the composition process, along with an appendix giving your prompts. I just don’t think that producing and posting this mass of computer-generated words will serve you well in your larger goals of exploring and communicating your ideas. Reply ↓
* Vadim Sokolov on August 28, 2026 11:50 AM at 11:50 amsaid: A few factual clarifications.

The workflow was not “write a prompt, ask a chatbot for a 30-page paper, and upload the result.” Many papers began with existing ideas, notes, mathematics, code, or drafts; others were newer. AI was then used iteratively in developing and writing them. The degree of AI involvement varied substantially across papers. Different papers had different histories and different levels of involvement by individual authors; there was no single uniform production process across the corpus.

None of this justifies describing the corpus as “all fake papers.” Nor does it establish that the papers resulted from the one-prompt/one-paper workflow described in these posts.

On disclosure: the extent of AI assistance was not consistently disclosed, and I agree that for papers with substantial AI involvement it should have been disclosed.

On the Riemann hypothesis: I have no involvement in that work and cannot speak to it. Characterizing a colleague as “delusional” and combining that with my interest in AI to explain “hundreds of junk papers” is speculation about people rather than analysis of the papers. Reply ↓
* Anonymous on August 28, 2026 11:56 AM at 11:56 amsaid: Why were the papers deleted after Andrew’s post came out? Reply ↓
* Vadim Sokolov on August 28, 2026 12:27 PM at 12:27 pmsaid: Good question. I just emailed SSRN asking it. They removed the papers.
* Vadim Sokolov on August 28, 2026 1:32 PM at 1:32 pmsaid: Good question. Here is there reply “SSRN is not able to share the specific reasons…”
They removed the papers.
* Anonymous on August 28, 2026 1:42 PM at 1:42 pmsaid: Sorry, I didn’t read the post carefully. The papers were taken down by SSRN (perhaps coincidentally), not the authors.

Andrew on August 28, 2026 12:02 PM at 12:02 pmsaid: Vadim:

Thanks for the clarifications.

Regarding the Riemann hypothesis: I don’t know about the math, but given the reputation of this conjecture, I’d guess that if some statistician thinks he’s proved it and nobody else thinks that, then he’s indeed delusional. It’s a speculation in the same way that if some amateur athlete told me he ran a 3:30 mile, I’d suspect he’s either delusional or faking it. And I could well believe that the same delusion that would make Nick think he has proved the Riemann hypothesis could also lead him to think that these AI-produced papers have genuine mathematical value.

Again, I encourage all of you to work out your ideas and write them out directly without producing tens of thousands of pages of computer-generated words. Ultimately the goal should be to work out the ideas and to communicate them to people, not simply to pile up mountains of words that nobody will read and often make no sense at all. Reply ↓
* Matt Skaggs on August 30, 2026 11:34 AM at 11:34 amsaid: Vadim,
Why did Nick Polson use two different SSRN accounts under different names? He is not here to answer, but surely you must know.

Without a plausible answer, we are assuming that one was for the serious work he did, the other was for this stuff, and he didn’t want readers to confuse the two. If there is a more benign answer, it would go a long way towards validating your defense here! Reply ↓
* Anonymous on September 27, 2026 10:11 PM at 10:11 pmsaid: Vadim:

You defend “Theories of Human Connection” as, at worst, “an erroneous or imperfect preprint.” After looking more closely at the paper, I think that substantially understates its problems.

The paper contains what appear to be classic AI hallucinations: quotations that do not appear in the works to which they are attributed, findings attributed to researchers who did not report them, and arguments built on those misattributions. Did any of the listed authors actually check the quotations, citations, and source claims before putting their names on the paper and posting it publicly? Did you and Nick read the finished paper?

For example, the chapters beginning on pp. 12, 28, 49, and 66 open with quotations attributed respectively to Morris’s “Intimate Behaviour,” Von Neumann and Morgenstern’s “Theory of Games,” Vaughan’s “Uncoupling,” and Yogananda’s “Autobiography of a Yogi.” None of those quotations appears in the cited books.

Several of the paper’s substantive arguments likewise depend on claims the cited sources do not make:

– Yogananda: The paper says Yogananda’s “key insight” was that a romantic relationship functions as a “laboratory” in which each partner’s selfishness is exposed and gradually overcome (p. 67), and it builds much of its spiritual argument around that proposition. But “Autobiography of a Yogi,” the only Yogananda work cited, says no such thing. The word “laboratory” appears there only in discussions of science and medicine, not romantic relationships.

– Gottman and Murray: The paper says Gottman and Murray “found” that small emotional states (e.g., a little grumpiness) have little effect on a partner while sufficiently intense ones (e.g., fury) suddenly have a large effect, and it uses this supposed empirical finding to explain why relationships can appear stable before changing abruptly. But Gottman and Murray did not “find” that relationship. They selected it as one possible mathematical form for their model. Indeed, “The Mathematics of Marriage” (2002, p. 132) explains that because this kind of influence had not previously been mathematically modeled, they were “free to choose any function that seemed reasonable.” Their alternative model assumes something quite different: influence proportional to the magnitude of the partner’s emotional state.

– Morris: The paper credits Morris with the “observation” that touch succeeds where language fails because touch operates at “a different logical level” from verbal communication (p. 36). Morris does say that “a gentle embrace can still do more good than a thousand earnest discussions” (“Intimate Behaviour,” 1997 preface). But he does not make the “logical level” argument. This terminology comes from Gregory Bateson’s 1956 paper “Toward a Theory of Schizophrenia.” The paper appears to have fused ideas from two different authors and attributed the resulting claim to one of them.

The Gottman claim is not merely insufficiently qualified; the paper attributes the figure to the wrong source and apparently to the wrong result. It says that Gottman and Murray’s mathematical model “predicts divorce with over 90% accuracy over [a] six-year follow-up period” (p. 58). “The Mathematics of Marriage” does not report such an accuracy figure for that model. The “more than 90%” statement in its preface (p. xi) refers to earlier research from Gottman’s laboratory. The 93% figure you cited in your response comes from Gottman and Levenson’s “The Timing of Divorce” (Journal of Marriage and the Family, 2000), which followed couples for fourteen years—not six—and was not a validation of the mathematical model described in the paper.

There are also citation and internal errors that should have been obvious on careful proofreading:

– The paper cites “Buunk et al. 2008” for a study actually published in 2002.

– The preface names sixteen “thinkers assembled here” and says each “identified a dimension of human connection” (p. 6). The paper discusses fifteen of them. Polson, the sixteenth name, is never mentioned again.

– Table 13.1 (p. 72) is titled “The thirteen dimensions of the cumulative model” but contains twelve entries. Two of those entries are not themselves dimensions of human connection: one is a criticism of Maslow, and another, “cumulative integration,” is effectively the synthesis of the preceding dimensions presented as though it were an additional dimension.

– Equation 6.4 (p. 36) is supposed to formalize the idea that touch can mitigate the damage caused by a double bind (contradictory messages). Yet the equation adds the double-bind distortion to total connection rather than subtracting it. Taken literally, the model says that a more severe double bind increases connection.

Taken together—nonexistent quotations, claims absent from the cited sources, conflation of different authors’ ideas, a wrongly sourced numerical claim, citation errors, counting mistakes, and an equation whose sign contradicts the argument it supposedly formalizes—these problems strongly suggest that the manuscript was not subjected to even elementary verification before it was posted under the authors’ names.

That is why I find your response more troubling than the paper itself. Calling this merely an “erroneous or imperfect preprint” understates the issue. Scholars make mistakes, but attributing quotations to books that do not contain them and findings to researchers who did not report them reflects a basic failure of verification for which the human authors—not the AI system—are responsible.

This is particularly important given your role directing an academic program devoted to AI and, by your own description, preparing students to “design, implement, and govern responsible AI systems” with “ethical foundations.” The example being set should not be that scholars may publish heavily AI-assisted work without adequate disclosure or source verification and then characterize the resulting nonexistent quotations and misattributed findings as ordinary imperfections of a preprint.

I am also troubled by the response from Shiva Maharaj, a coauthor on many of your and Polson’s papers. Rather than address Andrew’s substantive criticisms, he attacked Andrew personally and suggested that his dean should be contacted. The appropriate response to evidence of nonexistent quotations and misattributed findings is to check the sources, explain how the errors occurred, correct or withdraw the paper, disclose the role AI played, and determine whether similar problems affect your other AI-assisted work—not to attack the critic or complain that he failed to review hundreds of additional papers.

That question extends to the numerous self-published books released in 2026 under the names of you, Polson, and Maharaj. I do not assume those books contain the same problems without examining them. But given what appears in this paper, it is fair to ask whether their quotations, citations, and factual claims were independently checked by the people whose names appear on the covers, and whether substantial AI assistance was disclosed to readers.

Those questions seem considerably more important than whether Andrew used the word “fake.” Reply ↓
* Andrew on September 28, 2026 6:48 AM at 6:48 amsaid: Anon:

Thank you. This is helpful.

20. Tom on August 28, 2026 12:24 AM at 12:24 amsaid: I can’t carefully _read_ 6 or more papers in a day, let alone discern if I should believe them and figure out how they might apply to my related questions of interest. Can the audience be anything other than bots & AI ingestion?

I’m more interested in how this form of “mass production” will affect SSRN and other preprint services.

1) SSRN claims to ensure the posting of high-quality research not by peer-review, but by research integrity filters, including AI usage with no disclosure, AI and AI technologies as an author, and paper mill contributed content. I suggest they need a better filter. https://www.elsevier.support/ssrn/answer/research-integrity

1a) Perhaps their filters are good enough for this case but simply not fast enough, and as they work through the backlog of Polson preprints they flag and remove ach one, leading to the gradual shrinking number of preprints on the Polson page?

2) Will this mass production inflate the haystack of preprints enough that the ability to find relevant and even marginally worth skimming preprints is lost, and preprint services die out as n longer useful?

3) Will this mass production overwhelm the possibility of thoughtful (or any human) peer review? Or will there need to be some submission fee that goes toward peer reviewers, or some rule that after a couple of papers published someone cannot even coauthor a submitted paper unless they provide non-superficial peer reviews on some number of other submissions and keep their review to submission ratio high enough? Reply ↓
21. Celine on August 28, 2026 4:57 PM at 4:57 pmsaid: Nick Polson and that Shiva person also have *a lot* of books on Amazon all published in April-May 2026.. What are they doing??

https://www.amazon.com/s?k=nick+polson&i=stripbooks-intl-ship&s=date-desc-rank&crid=1F2NAJ1AFOM99&qid=1787950593&sprefix=nick+pol%2Cstripbooks-intl-ship%2C330&ref=sr_st_date-desc-rank&ds=v1%3AjqH4hYNHtfLpQZHCF8vz5YhrqvZQ8UvovoRpjpBWkrk Reply ↓
* Andrew on August 28, 2026 5:06 PM at 5:06 pmsaid: Celine:

Wow, that’s one busy-ass chatbot! I guess that, from their point of view, using a chatbot to write a book that they can slap their name on is no different from me writing a book using Latex, or our predecessors using typewriters. Productivity-enhancing tools all the way down, amirite? Reply ↓
* Raghu Parthasarathy on August 28, 2026 5:23 PM at 5:23 pmsaid: Would it be unethical to program a chatbot to give all the books 1 star reviews? Reply ↓
* Andrew on August 28, 2026 5:46 PM at 5:46 pmsaid: Raghu:

Don’t do it! As the saying goes, if you play with fire you’re gonna get burned. Reply ↓
* Dale Lehman on August 28, 2026 5:51 PM at 5:51 pmsaid: The breadth of the books is astonishing. I read some of the sample chapters available on Amazon and I can’t quite call these books garbage – in any case, I’ve seen worse. But the volume and scope just doesn’t make sense. The writing is not obviously AI produced (at least it doesn’t strike me that way), but with a little work could easily have been created that way. And given Polson’s background, I have to be suspicious that much of it is AI created. I’m still betting on the experiment hypothesis: there is no reason why AI can’t be used to produce volumes of stuff that sounds ok and might even be ok. One irony is that one of the books addresses the lack of time and attention that humans now face and how AI has made that worse. I view this outpouring of material has Polson’s demonstration of that. To what end? As others have pointed out, he doesn’t need the pubs nor citations. Either he is on some ego trip (that might even dwarf Trump’s) or his purpose is to show how easy it is to flood the academic publishing process with AI produced material (you can call it slop, but I’d rather call it material). The purpose of which evades me: wouldn’t it be more effective to just write about how easy it is to do so and what that means? What is the point of publishing all this stuff? Reply ↓
* Anonymous on August 28, 2026 7:13 PM at 7:13 pmsaid: Given Shiva and Vadim’s comments on the other post, this seems to be serious and intentional, expecting people to believe it and recognize their brilliance or something. Unfortunate.

Las on August 28, 2026 9:47 PM at 9:47 pmsaid: One of the books (Sindarov Unbound) has a single review:

Es una basura de libro, no tiene diagramas (aunque nombra diagramas continuamente ), nombra partidas que no tienen notación …las anotaciones son penosas, es una estafa de libro.

This book is trash, it has no diagrams (although it continuously refers to diagrams), names sections (?) that have no notation (?), the notes are shameful, it is a scam of a book.

Question marks mine as the translation escapes me (although I’m a native Spanish speaker) Reply ↓
* Las on August 28, 2026 9:49 PM at 9:49 pmsaid: Another one for Play like Tal: Good read! Reply ↓

22. Michael R. Lissack on August 29, 2026 8:28 PM at 8:28 pmsaid: I wrote to Vadim “I co authored some of them. They were not written by a bot. Ssrn removed them with no explanation. What is a bot?” Reply ↓
* Anonymous on August 31, 2026 12:48 AM at 12:48 amsaid: A bot is the larva of the botfly, which is an internal parasite of animals. Reply ↓

23. Roy on August 30, 2026 9:35 AM at 9:35 amsaid: I am beginning to wonder if they put something in the water at University of Chicago. After all, there was the University of Chicago Econ professor who was able to write with a straight face as to how he could not live on $450,000 a year. Reply ↓
* Andrew on August 30, 2026 10:58 AM at 10:58 amsaid: Roy:

Wait—did you actually see his face when he wrote that article?

In all seriousness, I’m assuming that his real annoyance was not having to live on a mere $450,000 a year but rather the injustice that various welfare queens, street cleaners, baristas, school teachers, etc., all felt they had a moral justification to tax him to support their lazy lifestyles.

From the perspective of this rich guy, it was adding insult to injury. The injury was the taxation that was preventing him from enjoying the full fruits of his labor and, to boot, harming the economy by replacing his sovereign consumer choices with government waste and fraud. The insult was all the soft liberals (including most of his University of Chicago colleagues) thinking that he didn’t have the moral right to that $450,000. Publishing his essay didn’t do much about the injury (except by perhaps changing the political climate so as to very slightly increase the probability of electing politicians who would implement upper-income tax cuts), but at least he’d be addressing the insult. Reply ↓
* Roy on August 30, 2026 9:22 PM at 9:22 pmsaid: May be – but Chicago is where the guy who fit the notorious Excel Cubic function to the COVID-19 data is from, and that it would end in a month or two. No matter what you think about Covid (ie let’s not re-iterate that endless discussion) that thing was a total piece of junk.

So I go with they have put something in the water – I mean I now have n=3. Reply ↓
* Andrew on August 30, 2026 10:54 PM at 10:54 pmsaid: Also, Chicago is where they did that notorious regression discontinuity analysis of air pollution in China, the one that motivated my paper with Guido.

So, yeah, maybe you’re on to something!
* Anonymous on August 30, 2026 11:32 PM at 11:32 pmsaid: Andrew:
This reminds me of when you referred to Harvard as the “place where they lied about dishonesty experiments” and Columbia as the “place where they faked their US News ranking” and Berkeley as “the place where they never disciplined the lying sleep researcher”…

*all the quotes are paraphrases and not exact

24. Ivo Steijn on August 30, 2026 10:50 AM at 10:50 amsaid: If it’s an experiment then it’s bad judgment: we really don’t need bot spam on SSRN. If it’s serious then it’s concerning: if they don’t realize that this spamming will cause people to regard everything they produce as spam then they’re idiots or mentally ill.

So many books and papers and nothing about non-Gaussian kalman filters… Reply ↓
* Andrew on August 30, 2026 10:59 AM at 10:59 amsaid: Ivo:

It seems that SSRN agrees with you, as it seems that it was they who took the articles down. Reply ↓

25. Shiva Maharaj on August 31, 2026 4:11 PM at 4:11 pmsaid: The papers should be discussed and analyzed? Reply ↓
26. Shiva Maharaj on August 31, 2026 7:38 PM at 7:38 pmsaid: Andrew just happened to be looking and taking screenshots. Interesting. Reply ↓
* AAAnonymous on September 1, 2026 2:53 AM at 2:53 amsaid: Quote from above: “Andrew just happened to be looking and taking screenshots. Interesting.”

I’m not sure “happened to be looking” and “interesting” are optimal, or even appropriate, words to use in this case. To me at least, it seems perfectly plausible, and normal, that reading through the comment section can provide new information that makes one check and verify things or then write a follow up post about.

This is even more likely to happen when things are changing and when new information and comments appear (e.g. see all the P.S., P.P.S., P.P.P.S, etc. below the original post). And when writing a follow up blog post about this developing case and changing situation, it could be seen as helpful to provide some more information, or images, to communicate things in a certain way (e.g. by using screen shots of the author profile in which the dwindling number of papers can be seen).

More information concerning this all can be read in the blog post titled “The Incredible Shrinking SSRN Page” mentioned above in the P.P.P.S.:

“I was going through comments on this morning’s post which involved the amazing productivity evidenced by the list of preprints here:”

“The number of papers dropped from 259 to 99!

Then when preparing this new post, I checked again:”

“I guess someone’s running the bot in reverse.

P.S. It’s down to 44. I wonder what the story is.

P.P.S. Down to 1:”

Please also note the speculating about the possible reasons during the reporting about this developing story and changing situation (e.g. “I guess someone’s running the bot in reverse.”), and the new information that became available and noted in the P.S. and P.P.S., etc. below the post. This is all further in line with the reporting about this case here in this blog post, where something is written about, people comment, new information becomes available, and people try and understand and make sense of what might have occurred, etc. Reply ↓

27. UofC Grad on September 5, 2026 2:00 AM at 2:00 amsaid: As someone who has known Nick in the past, I’m a bit surprised by this multitude of articles and books. However, I think you’ve missed a fifth possibility that would suggest gentle handling: a mental health issue. The papers and books on philosophy, religion, and issues well beyond anything econometric plus the videos on the Riemann Hypothesis suggest someone who is no longer bound by the intellectual boundaries or social mores of proper research.

And, if we’re honest, this isn’t unheard of. As a grad student and young professor, I got occasional messages (sent to a few hundred people) from a senior professor ranting about his advisor (a very well-known professor), how his advisor had mistreated him 20+ years prior and stolen his ideas, how another professor knew about it and was complicit and a mafioso, and how some recent brilliant results were being suppressed. I also had a colleague who late in his career started putting out garbage/heterodox research and was convinced the government was secretly observing his work and undermining the review process to discredit his work since it threatened them somehow.

While I know it isn’t in vogue as of late, I might take a gentle and more concerned tone, assume a lack of malevolence or deceit, and instead ask some of Nick’s colleagues if they know about all the papers and books, if he is doing ok, if he’s going through some big change in his life, etc Reply ↓
* Andrew on September 5, 2026 8:04 AM at 8:04 amsaid: Uofc:

I’m on that list too, so, yeah, every few months I get the email from that professor ranting about his former advisor. I feel bad for the ranter who is evidently living in this state of disturbance, and I also feel bad for the target of his fury. I’ve occasionally been the target of angry people in this way, and it’s just horrible. It also must be horrible to be one of these people who sends the angry emails or posts the angry things online.

There are also people whose mental state exists in some intermediate state. For example, several years ago some self-promoter on the internet started making stuff up about me and posting it online. I don’t know if this guy was delusional; rather, it seemed like it might be some strategy on his part to get attention. But I don’t know that he was completely sane either. I’ve also had this feeling about some internet trolls, academic and otherwise, that in some way their promotion of made-up information is a deliberate strategy to get attention or to win an argument, but in a larger sense they have a screw loose if they think this is a good way to advance their ideas.

To return to the case at hand: the Riemann hypothesis thing and the bizarre unified-theory aspect of some of these articles does suggest that the people involved are a little bit off in some way. At the same time, some large percentage of people express what I would consider to be delusional beliefs in ghosts, space aliens, etc.: often the determining factor seems to be what is socially acceptable. So maybe the people involved in all those AI-assisted papers and books are in a kind of doom loop, talking mostly to each other and reinforcing the sorts of ambitious delusions that in the past would’ve come up as fun speculations in the faculty lounge (“Hey, I have this crazy idea of how to prove the Riemann hypothesis . . . it just might work, what do you say?”) but now take on a life of their own. All this is made worse by the ability of chatbots to turn out endless pages. In the past if you had a nutty idea, it would take some work to write it up as an article or book, but now you can produce it instantly.

So, what I’m saying is that it could be something less than a psychotic break (or whatever is the technical term) but just misplaced scholarly and scientific ambition that, instead of being tempered by outside criticism is instead amplified, cyclotron-style, among a small group of people who reinforce each others’ delusions. But that’s sad too. It seems like an academic version of something we’ve seen elsewhere on the internet, with political conspiracy theories, extreme racism and sexism, etc. Little doom loops of intensity which can sometimes make their way into the outside world but in any case can do a lot of harm to the people involved. It is concerning. Reply ↓
* Mark on September 5, 2026 11:33 AM at 11:33 amsaid: So before calling people out on their BS or worse (e.g. lies and fraud), we should do a welfare check on them, including contacting family, friends, and colleagues, so we don’t hurt their feelings? I wonder how forthcoming people would be to share private information about mental wellbeing with random people. Reply ↓
* AAAnonymous on September 5, 2026 3:28 PM at 3:28 pmsaid: It is quite interesting to think about scientists cracking so to say, or scientists moving to writing about obscure things or strange topics. I think it can be a consequence of 1) thinking very deeply and very much about things, and 2) the topic or actual thinking being, or becoming, too complex or too vague.

I have possibly noticed this myself in some temporary and less serious version I think a few times when reading and thinking about something way to intensely way too much for a short period in time. I view it as mentally becoming stuck in mud or quicksand, or something like that. I aim to avoid experiencing that state or sensation again, and think I can much better sense and determine whether I am approaching that state or feeling. I then simply go and do some other things nowadays, and let things rest. Like a shaken snowglobe that you put back down and watch the particles gently fall down until things are clear again. I think I have learned that I have done my share of thinking too much for too long, and I think I have learned that I don’t want to think too much for too long. With many things in life, perhaps it’s important to have balance in things.

Anyway, the comment above and your reply made me think of a paper I came across and didn’t use by T. Szasz titled “Curing, coercing, and claims-making” (1993). Here’s a quote:

“I have sought to alert the medical and psychiatric professions, as well as the public, to the tendency in modern societies, both democratic and totalitarian, of reclassifying deviant and criminal acts as mental diseases, deviant and criminal actors as psychiatric patients, and social controls as therapeutic interventions; and to the consequent lessening of reliance on free will, self-discipline, and criminal sanctions for the maintenance of the social order, and increased reliance on a wide variety of psychiatric and quasi-psychiatric measures, epitomised by the use of psychiatric hospital admission and psychiatric drugging. To pithily describe confusing metaphorical
mental diseases with literal brain diseases, I have suggested the phrase “the myth of mental illness”; and to name the political order in which the state uses doctors and hospitals rather than policemen and prisons to coerce and confine miscreants, and justifies constraint and compulsion as therapy rather than punishment, I have proposed the name “Therapeutic State”. Reply ↓
* UofC Grad on September 7, 2026 7:30 PM at 7:30 pmsaid: You seem to have missed the context here. The context was exactly my point: this is not a random person but somebody Andrew and I both know — have met in-person and know to have done very good work — who is suddenly behaving very differently from how they have behaved in the past and how good seasoned researchers behave. Yes, we call out BS when we see it; however, for someone we know, we would be terrible friends and acquaintances if we did not first have concern for their well-being. (And yes, we also know the people we would be asking. Is it a little delicate? Sure, but it’s exactly the sort of question one might ask in a one-on-one at a conference cocktail hour.) Reply ↓

28. Persiflage on September 24, 2026 2:55 PM at 2:55 pmsaid: Concerning Polson’s published “proof” of the Riemann Hypothesis, I was the person who convinced him that it was wrong and that he should withdraw the paper. He struck me as a quiet intelligent man who was completely out of his depth on this particular problem (perhaps we all are). I wrote a blog post at the time on the details but never posted it; this moment seemed a reasonable time to revisit it and you can read it here: https://galoisrepresentations.org/2026/09/24/are-business-schools-intellectually-bankrupt-part-two/. Reply ↓

芝加哥大学商学院教授 Polson 2026年已发表258篇论文引发AI批量写作争议

Statistical Modeling, Causal Inference, and Social Science

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