NeurIPS let an AI detector decide who reached peer review
NeurIPS says its 2026 Position Paper Track will desk-reject 178 submissions, 18.4% of the total, after screening them with Pangram, a proprietary AI-writing detector. Another 123 authors must prove substantial human involvement or risk rejection. The uncomfortable part is the governance choice: a probabilistic detector became a gatekeeper for scholarly review, putting the burden of disproving a score on researchers.