More than half of recent astronomy papers are written with language-model assistance
Language models leave a distinctive vocabulary in the prose they help write, and we measure how much of the astronomy literature now carries it. From the full text of 207,111 astro-ph papers spanning 2015 to mid-2026, we count those words in each paper and model the counts, in proportion to paper length, as a mixture of assisted and unassisted writing in a hierarchical Bayesian model. Papers from before 2020 calibrate the unassisted rate, and the 392 papers that disclose model use calibrate the assisted one. Our answer depends on how often these words would appear today if nobody used a model, a rate that must be modeled rather than observed, so we extend it past 2020 under three assumpti...
| Authors | Serat M. Saad, Yuan-Sen Ting |
|---|---|
| Primary category | astro-ph.IM |
| Published | 9 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 9 September 2026 |
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