Artificial intelligence has never been more powerful. It now generates photorealistic images, writes academic articles, and even contributes to opinion pieces. However, this rise in capability raises a critical question: Is AI truly improving intellectual production, or is it contributing to the saturation of traditional knowledge validation channels?
A Flood of Publications... Drowning Out Quality
Sample (2025) reveals a concerning trend in the academic world: the number of scientific articles published is exploding at such a rate that researchers themselves can no longer keep up. Faced with millions of annual publications, peer review—the cornerstone of scientific rigor—has become unsustainable. This leads to a decline in the average quality of publications and a loss of confidence in published results.
According to the same article, the proliferation of AI-generated or AI-assisted texts is making the problem worse. Tools like ChatGPT allow any user to produce a structured and credible article in seconds. But appearances can be deceiving: questionable methodologies, non-reproducible results, or factual errors inserted unintentionally... all with very real consequences.
The Illusion of Meaning in Generated Texts
Le Monde (2025), for its part, questions the role of AI in writing opinion pieces. Can an op-ed still be credible if its author is an algorithm? Can thought be attributed to a machine? The article asks, "Can AI, no matter how advanced, formulate its own thoughts? Can it feel injustice, express indignation, doubt, believe, or hope?" The answer is clearly no. Yet this doesn't stop machines from mimicking these emotions and being convincing.
In practice, this means that many opinion pieces and contributions are now produced by AI, often without detection. Freedom of expression is thus being distorted: it is no longer a reflection of human thought but of an algorithmic artifact.
A Troubling Parallel in Healthcare Communication
This phenomenon extends beyond academia. In the pharmaceutical industry, there is also an explosion of documentation: brochures, LinkedIn posts, explanatory videos, reports, and clinical summaries. Two main factors explain this inflation: the rise of micro-marketing through social media and the advent of personalized treatments requiring targeted materials.
However, more content means more potential for errors. In France, it is the ANSM (National Agency for the Safety of Medicines and Health Products) that verifies the compliance of these documents. But due to a lack of staff, not all communications are systematically reviewed. Gaps are widening between laboratories, with some disseminating highly marketing-oriented messages at the expense of scientific rigor.
Anticipating the Risks: The Urgent Need for Adapted Verification Tools
Today, we must consider a scenario that is now likely: thousands of AI-generated medical documents submitted to overwhelmed human verification processes.