AI can now generate academic peer-review reports for finance journals that are indistinguishable from those written by human experts, even arguing against its own conclusions.
March 31, 2026
Original Paper
The Scholarly Review Process in Finance: Experiments in Artificial Intelligence
SSRN · 6451699
The Takeaway
An experiment showed that AI agents can produce 'expert' rejections of high-level finance papers in under two minutes. Because the AI could also effectively 'dispute' its own reports when asked, it challenges the institutional assumption that peer review provides a uniquely human form of scientific validation.
From the abstract
I ask an AI agent to specifically reject papers without human intervention. I present the agents with three of my coauthored papers: one working paper, and two published papers in so-called "A journals." This note presents the referee's reports generated by the agent. The reports all took less than 120 seconds to generate, with only the pdfs of the paper as input. I also asked the agent to "dispute" its own report on the working paper, and it did so with ease. I conclude that AI-generated report