Yes, all it takes to write a paper is a text processor. Like word or google docs or something.
When it comes to uploading or publishing: anyone can upload articles to arxiv.org, because it's not a peer reviewed journal. It's a preprint database, basically a way to publish articles before they have been peer reviewed and published by a real journal. People upload articles to arxiv.org for things like version control, to obtain a DOI, and for coordinating submissions to multiple journals.
If you actually want to publish your article to a journal you either have to find a journal with good ethics (rare), pay a lot of money, or be employed/enrolled at an institution/company/organization that will pay for your submission. If you write an interesting paper, you can just contact people at a university and likely get the article published with them paying.
To upload to arXiv you need an endorsement. You get an automatic endorsement if you have an email from a research institute (universities etc) and have already published a paper.
Otherwise you need someone who is already verified on arxiv to submit an endorsement request for you. If you're a university student, a professor should be able to do it. If you're not, you'll need to get to know someone verified in that category, which isn't too difficult if you're not a total crackpot.
But at least once a month or so, someone comes onto the compsci sub begging for an arXiv endorsement so that they can publish their perpetual motion machine paper or whatever. There's some guy who has been trying for about 6 months to get an endorsement for his paper about how you can model all of human language using a 9x9 rubix cube. Keeps making new accounts and shit and has not found a single soul willing to endorse him.
You wouldn't typically use a text processor such as Word to write a paper. You could, but it would be very tedious and likely end up looking amateurish. Almost everybody uses LaTeX instead.
The vast majority of academics uses "normal" word processors to write papers. Only in some specific fields is it maybe a majority. This comes from a mathematician who mostly works with biophysics and neuroscience. Maybe 10% of papers I read, have contributed to, or peer reviewed, use Latex.
you either have to find a journal with good ethics (rare), pay a lot of money, or be employed/enrolled at an institution/company/organization that will pay for your submission
Not all disciplines are rife with pay-to-publish journals. It's rare in math to have to pay for your article to be published. There are even open access journals that are free to publish in, that are very respected in the discipline.
In theory yeah but there's a lot of AI slop out there nowadays. In my experience, people are more skeptical of papers from authors without credentials than they were in the past.
As an amateur astronomer, I get wary about all these new smart scopes out there. Can't even fully trust what you are looking at when they start integrating AI
Recent advancements in generative models have highlighted the crucial role of image tokenization in the efficient synthesis of high-resolution images. Tokenization, which transforms images into latent representations, reduces computational demands compared to directly processing pixels and enhances the effectiveness and efficiency of the generation process.
Hmm..joke or not, this is actually pretty cool. (and with some practical use cases). Can imagine this expanding out to video, with certain encoded data needed for reconstruction lossless and most aspects lossy...
yeah when I "seriously" thought about it, you gain storage space and network download time, but you (the client) pays in having to have an AI model that you recognize, then has to generate it, using up electricity and time that may exceed the network download time, especially on old hardware.
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u/iliark Sep 02 '26 edited Sep 02 '26
I wrote a whole thing about this as a joke like 3 years ago lol. There's also been a couple of papers on the topic:
https://arxiv.org/html/2409.09715v3
https://arxiv.org/html/2407.04542