Chronicle of Higher Education, August 2026
Ask any journal editor today about the effects of generative AI on academic publishing, and you’ll get an earful. It’s not just that AI style is irritating (though it is). Beyond the syntactically flat, lexically precious, oily, and boring style of AI-generated writing, journal editors are receiving entire revise-and-resubmit requests miraculously executed in a single evening. And we are getting crushed with submissions. At recent academic conferences in applied linguistics and writing studies, academic-journal editors reported that their submission rates have doubled or even tripled in the last year. All those machine-written submissions must still be read and discussed on the chance that there might be something to them, and vetting all this slop takes editors’ attention away from papers with authentic datasets and real human insights.
