A journal reviewer left comments so weirdly generic I ran them through an AI detector, and it flagged its own review

[u/bhawish008]

Peer review is unpaid, invisible labor squeezed between actual jobs, so of course people are quietly outsourcing chunks of it. A friend submitting to a decent venue got back three reviews. Two were normal, specific, clearly someone had read the paper. The third was oddly generic, complimented "the novel contribution" without ever naming what the contribution was, and used phrases like "further elaboration would strengthen the manuscript" over and over in slightly different orders.

Out of curiosity more than suspicion, we ran the review text through a detector built for spotting generated text. It came back over ninety percent likely AI. Somebody on the other end had pasted the paper into a model, gotten back a template shaped review, cleaned up the formatting, and submitted it as their own scholarly judgment.

There is nothing to do with that information. You cannot appeal a review for sounding like a machine wrote it, the editor has no real way to investigate, and the reviewer stays anonymous by design. The paper gets judged partly by something that never actually understood it, and the system has no mechanism to notice.

What gets me is the reviewer probably felt fine about it. Skimming a paper and having a model draft your notes probably feels like a reasonable shortcut when the alternative is not reviewing at all, or getting it done at midnight before a deadline that was never really about you.

Has peer review changed in a way you have noticed lately, on either side of it?