The Sound We Haven’t Heard Before: A Commentary on “Fighting Fire with Fire: Infusing AI into Peer Review to Sustain Quality Scholarship”

I agree with the main point of “Fighting Fire with Fire: Infusing AI into Peer Review to Sustain Quality Scholarship” (Bhargava et al. 2026): journals should govern artificial intelligence (AI) rather than leave it to the shadows. Where I differ is on the scale of the fire. The paper treats rising submission volume as the blaze that will consume us. I doubt it burns that hot, at least at a journal like ours.

My doubt goes back to something I heard as a new PhD student. Kenneth Dunn, the dean who welcomed our cohort to Carnegie Mellon, told us, more or less, that intellectual excitement there was a commodity, abundant, almost in the air.

I have come to believe the opposite. Excitement is the least commodity-like thing we have, because we quickly tire of everything. As Taylor Swift sings in Welcome to New York, “Everybody here wanted somethin’ more / Searchin’ for a sound we hadn’t heard before.” That is us. Repetition bores us. This boredom is a powerful sensor, more powerful than the AI detectors, which are themselves AI tools.

That sensor changes how we read the threat. We are not immune: submissions keep climbing, and so do AI tells in the work and in the reviews. The problem is real. I think it’s smaller for us than for most, though, and it’s best met with vigilance, not panic. AI will flood every pipeline with plausible-sounding work, yet our shared fatigue with sameness works like an invisible hand, marking down the derivative, however polished. An AI model or “skill” tuned using what we have already rewarded cannot give us what we actually crave, the sound we have not heard before. Supply will adjust to that market. The journal’s submission fee for nonmembers, intended for other purposes, may also prove an unexpected check on a blaze that is otherwise almost free to set. The threat, then, may be more contained for Management Science than the paper’s alarm implies.

One condition holds, though, and here the authors point the way. They are right that AI should stay a nonfinal input, and that humans, not AI, should own novelty and contribution. I would press the point harder. Whatever workflow or tool we adopt, one test should govern: does it ask more of our human judgment or less? The designs that ask the most will repay it, not in faster decisions but in a field kept alive to the new. Protect that judgment, and Management Science will do more than come through the fire. It will thrive, restless as ever, still searching for the sound it has not heard before, still able to be surprised.