Publish or Perish in the Era of ChatGPT

I argue that rather than being viewed as the main goal of academic creativity, publications should be viewed as simply another source of academic creativity and treated like conference presentations, teaching, and, most importantly, paper reviewing. We need to stop incentivizing the production of numerous publications. The number of published articles is increasing at an alarming rate, and so are retractions. Changing the system is especially important now that LLMs such as ChatGPT have entered academic publishing. LLMs exacerbate the practical problems of our current publication model and raise important ethical concerns. By examining the epistemic goals of academic publishing and the reward structure tied to publishing, I argue that providing new pathways to promotion and tenure can mitigate some of the problems with our current model.