#publishing

Astragon closes Independent Arts successor studio Astragon Development

Simulation publisher Astragon Entertainment is closing Astragon Development, the German studio previously known as Independent Arts Software. Read more

GamesIndustry.biz · EN

Fake film deals and emails from top agents: who is behind the explosion in literary scams?

Writers are being bombarded daily with invitations from fake book groups and offers to publicise their work. For the scamming industry, aspiring authors can be a soft touch • This piece first appeared in the Dial ‘Hello Professor Snigdha Poonam,” the email began. I read that again. Nobody has ever called me “professor” for the obvious reason that I am not a professor. Bracing myself, I read on. The email was from Timothy Firth, organiser of a Seattle-based life-drawing community with 1,943 members that regularly has “thoughtful discussions inspired by creative works”. A recent inspiration was

The Guardian Long Read · EN

I Used AI to Fake a Scientific Paper. Here’s What Happened

Science has a spam problem. And the spam filter is getting clogged up. According to all reports, academic publishing is drowning in what has come to be called AI slop: low-quality, mass-produced content generated with AI. By 2025, an estimated 57 percent of all published academic articles exhibited detectable evidence of large language model (LLM) influence, a massive jump from 12 percent in 2023. What’s more, over 12 percent of Nature Communications reviews were found to be completely AI-generated in 2025. Given that for every 40 papers showing statistical evidence of AI usage in 2025, only o

IEEE Spectrum · EN