It's not a fully consensus view, but a majority of sociologists agree that high severity deterrence has limited effectiveness against crime. Instead, certainty of enforcement is the most salient factor.

> The students, if they are, should be banned for life.

I'm all for repurcussions ... but a life is a long time and students are usually only at the beginning of it.

Why not put them on a chain and let village stone them? Or better yet shoot them on the spot! That would send a message for sure.

Well, maybe they found themselves in the last hours of the deadline without the reviews done... in some cases due to procrastination, but in a few cases perhaps because life is hard and they just couldn't do it. So they used the LLM as a last resort to not go beyond deadline (which I assume maybe was penalized as well?)

To err is human, it makes sense that they are punished (and the harshest part of the punishment is not having a paper rejected, it's the loss of face with coauthors and others, BTW. Face is important in academia) but "for life" is way too much IMO.

This year, having their own submissions desk-rejected is strong enough of a signal that the policy has some teeth behind it. Let’s ban em for life next year.

I strongly feel that deterrence should be the goal here, not retribution IMO.

It has been shown time and again that, for most people, teaching them to be better and giving second chances is more effective than using forever-punishment as a warning for others.

This line of reasoning interests me because it seems to arise in other contexts as well.

Do very harsh punishments significantly reduce future occurrences of the offense in question?

I've heard opponents of the death penalty argue that it's generallynot the case. E.g., because often the criminals aren't reasoning in terms that factor in the death penalty.

On the other hand (and perhaps I'm misinformed), I've heard that some countries with death penalties for drug dealers have genuinely fewer problems with drug addiction. Lower, I assume, than the numbers you'd get from simply executing every user.

So I'm curious where the truth lies.

My understanding is that something among those lines happened:

> All Policy A (no LLMs) reviews that were detected to be LLM generated were removed from the system. If more than half of the reviews submitted by a Policy A reviewer were detected to be LLM generated, then all of their reviews were deleted, and the reviewer themselves was removed from the reviewer pool.

Half is a bit lenient in my view, but I suppose they wanted to avoid even a single false positive.

Between banning someone for life and not doing anything, there usually are some other options.

- return to drawn and quartered in the town square?

Thank goodness we have you passing judgment on the internet; otherwise who else would be around for us to do it? I'm glad you're willing to destroy someone for a mistake rather than letting them learn and change. We all know that arbitrary and harsh punishments solve everything.

I've been an AC (the person who manages the reviewing process and translates reviews into accept/reject decisions) at ICML and similar conferences a few times. In my experience, grad students tend to be pretty good reviewers. They have more time, they are less jaded, and they are keener to do a good job. Senior people are more likely to have the deep and broad field knowledge to accurately place a paper's value, but they are also more likely to write a short shallow review and move on. I think the worst reviews I've seen have been from senior people.

It's usually not "noob" students. Big conferences require reviewers to have at least one (usually more) published paper in major venues. For students, this usually means they went through the process of being the first author on a few papers.

Because someone has to do it. Conference submissions have ballooned as the field itself has ballooned.

Whats your suggestion?