For a while now I’ve been speculating about what would happen when AI agents started being able to write papers indistinguishable in quality from those that have been typical of the sad state of hep-th for quite a while. Sabine Hossenfelder today has AI Is Bringing “The End of Theory”, in which she gives her cynical take that the past system of grant-holding PIs using grad students/postdocs to produce lots of mediocre papers with the PI’s name on them is about to change dramatically. Once AI agents can produce mediocre papers much more quickly than the grad students/postdocs, then anyone can play and we’ll get flooded by such papers from not just those PIs, but everyone else.
I decided to take a look at the arXiv hep-th submissions, and quickly generated the following numbers, by simple searches using
https://arxiv.org/search/advanced
to find all hep-th submissions in various date ranges.
For 12/1 to 12/31 the numbers were
2022: 634
2023: 684
2024: 780
2025: 1192
For 1/1 to 2/1
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