"Lauer notes that not long before he left NIH, he and his colleagues identified a principal investigator (PI) who had submitted more than 40 distinct applications in a single submission round, most of which appeared to be partially or entirely AI generated. The incident was “stunning” and “disappointing,” says Lauer, who was not involved in creating the new NIH policy but hopes the cap will discourage other researchers from abusing the system."
Always somebody who ruins things for everybody else.
I think its fair that the decision criteria should be qualitative, its just a bummer that its happening at a time with a complicated political environment and dwindling research funds, making it harder for researchers
As a scientist myself, grant proposals are an ideal use case for LLMs:
- Massive time sink. Those of us at senior/PI levels devote a lot of time to grant writing, often more than to actual research.
- Not something that you really get much useful learning or enrichment from (apart from learning to write better grant proposals the next time). The part of brainstorming and structuring ideas is useful but you would mostly do it without grant writing anyway, all the actual writing and polishing (which is 95% of the time) isn't. Definitely not an efficient use of the amount of hours it takes.
- I don't know specifically for NIH, but in my (non-US) context, grant proposals are full of formulaic sections that aren't really useful (Gantt chart, data management plan, etc.) When I'm in an evaluator role, I tend to outright skip many of them, not out of neglect or laziness but because they're just useless ritual fluff.
- As a consequence of the above three points, most of us dislike or even hate this part of our work.
- The meta for most funding agencies I know has long been to overhype and to use exaggeratedly positive language and takes. Exactly what LLMs are naturals at.
- If you're a non-native English speaker and write grant requests in English (common in Europe), the LLM also helps you level the playing field with native speakers, which is quite a big deal. From a naive outside standpoint you might think that scientific grant evaluation is all about the actual ideas and CVs, but the truth is that in practice, ability to pitch your ideas better than other competitors in your call is key.
- Honestly in the last grant I wrote, Gemini came up with some paragraphs that I consider to be clearly better than what I would have written by myself. Clear, concise, attractive to read, etc. It's just very good at writing. I'm better than it at the actual research, but at writing, let alone in English where I'm not a native? I don't have a chance.
As a result of this... good luck convincing scientists not to use LLMs for this. I'm pretty sure that if you ask, you will find two types of scientists: those that tell you that they use LLMs for grant writing and those who are hypocrites and deny it. I wouldn't even trust a scientist who didn't use LLMs for this (unless it's out of some very deep quasireligious conviction): why waste your time? Don't you want to have more time to do actual science?
This reminds me of how I used to have spam-filled email inbox before I switched over to GMail. It almost feels like we are back to that state. There's now a large demand in keeping the context of humans free of AI bullshit. I wonder what the solution to this would look like? Identity-based blacklisting?
Seems like a band-aid solution for a broken system.
But in general science will have to deal with that problem. Written text used to "proof" that the author spend some level of thought into the topic. With AI that promise is broken.
This seems like a good example of a more general issue; when you have a machine that produces bullshit mixed with gem-like phraseology, at a pace that we cannot possibly match as humans, we may be faced with intellectual denial of service attacks.
There was a natural barrier of investing time into writing the proposal.
This barrier is clearly broken now.
A different barrier could be money that people submitting grant proposals would need to pay. First grant proposal could be $0, second $1, third $10, fourth $100, etc.
Another "gift" from AI to the world. Another line to the long list of "minor side effects" from uncontrolled, unapollogetic corporations releasing radical technology into a world that didn't agree to it.
If I write anything, and put my name as the author, I'm 100% lying if I am just copy pasting text.
This holds true 10 years ago, if I copied in any text without attribution. A novel, a book, a grant app, a paper, whatever.
Just because you're now copying large swaths of text from an LLM, doesn't make it better than copying from a person, eg plagiarism. And if you took a person's text 10 years ago, and modified a few words out of thousands, yes, that'd be called plagiarism too.
(No, a spell checker isn't that. It's correcting your word for the same word. If you think spellcheckers are the same as whole paragraph insertion, please check your ethics meter, it's broken.)
If the work isn't yours, you need to say so. Otherwise you're being dishonest.
If people get upset at the notion of disclosing, that feels like guilty behaviour. Otherwise, why not disclose?
Now, taking a step back? We're in a period of transition.
I agree that vast imbalances are being created here. This is the true problem.
For example, an application process could state "LLM applications are fine", or not. Instead?
The current is "no" without clearly saying so, for obvious reasons (it's copying work you didn't write, as your own ... plagiarism), but any such "no" without a high incident of detection and punishment, is worse than anything.
The 6 applications seems like a cop out, although it is logical. It should also be coupled with a "OK you win, use LLMs" statement too.
On another note, soon there will be two types of people, and only one of which I will engage in thoughtful email/text communication with.
Those who use LLMs, and people worth talking too.
Of what value is any meaningful conversation, if the other person's response is an LLM paste? Might as well just talk to chatgpt instead.
(note, I'm talking about friendly debate among friends or colleagues. Seeking their opinion or vice versa.)
I can't speak to whether the 6 applications is the correct number, but it seems like a reasonable first pass to apply some limit as long as the NIH is closely monitoring this and modifying the restrictions as needed.
For perspective, the CS programs in the NSF already have a two-submission limit per year [1].
Besides reducing the incentive to spam, this rule has had another positive effect: As a researcher without funding, you don't have to spend your whole year writing grants. You can, instead, spend your time on actual research.
With that said, NIH grants tend to me much more narrow than CS ones, and I imagine that it takes a lot more grants to keep a lab going...
The same is happening in the Computer Security academic research realm. All of the four top conferences (USENIX Security, ACM CCS, IEEE S&P, and NDSS) have instituted a submission cap--you can't have your name on more than 6 papers being submitted in a given cycle. This has all happened within the last year, likely due to the same GenAI abuse that puts undue burden on PC reviewers.
15 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 39.9 ms ] thread"Lauer notes that not long before he left NIH, he and his colleagues identified a principal investigator (PI) who had submitted more than 40 distinct applications in a single submission round, most of which appeared to be partially or entirely AI generated. The incident was “stunning” and “disappointing,” says Lauer, who was not involved in creating the new NIH policy but hopes the cap will discourage other researchers from abusing the system."
Always somebody who ruins things for everybody else.
- Massive time sink. Those of us at senior/PI levels devote a lot of time to grant writing, often more than to actual research.
- Not something that you really get much useful learning or enrichment from (apart from learning to write better grant proposals the next time). The part of brainstorming and structuring ideas is useful but you would mostly do it without grant writing anyway, all the actual writing and polishing (which is 95% of the time) isn't. Definitely not an efficient use of the amount of hours it takes.
- I don't know specifically for NIH, but in my (non-US) context, grant proposals are full of formulaic sections that aren't really useful (Gantt chart, data management plan, etc.) When I'm in an evaluator role, I tend to outright skip many of them, not out of neglect or laziness but because they're just useless ritual fluff.
- As a consequence of the above three points, most of us dislike or even hate this part of our work.
- The meta for most funding agencies I know has long been to overhype and to use exaggeratedly positive language and takes. Exactly what LLMs are naturals at.
- If you're a non-native English speaker and write grant requests in English (common in Europe), the LLM also helps you level the playing field with native speakers, which is quite a big deal. From a naive outside standpoint you might think that scientific grant evaluation is all about the actual ideas and CVs, but the truth is that in practice, ability to pitch your ideas better than other competitors in your call is key.
- Honestly in the last grant I wrote, Gemini came up with some paragraphs that I consider to be clearly better than what I would have written by myself. Clear, concise, attractive to read, etc. It's just very good at writing. I'm better than it at the actual research, but at writing, let alone in English where I'm not a native? I don't have a chance.
As a result of this... good luck convincing scientists not to use LLMs for this. I'm pretty sure that if you ask, you will find two types of scientists: those that tell you that they use LLMs for grant writing and those who are hypocrites and deny it. I wouldn't even trust a scientist who didn't use LLMs for this (unless it's out of some very deep quasireligious conviction): why waste your time? Don't you want to have more time to do actual science?
But in general science will have to deal with that problem. Written text used to "proof" that the author spend some level of thought into the topic. With AI that promise is broken.
This barrier is clearly broken now.
A different barrier could be money that people submitting grant proposals would need to pay. First grant proposal could be $0, second $1, third $10, fourth $100, etc.
> According to the new notice, the number of PIs who submit more than six applications per year is “relatively low.”
I imagine that, given funding cuts, PIs are going to try to work harder to find funding opportunities (i.e. more proposals submitted) for insurance.
If I write anything, and put my name as the author, I'm 100% lying if I am just copy pasting text.
This holds true 10 years ago, if I copied in any text without attribution. A novel, a book, a grant app, a paper, whatever.
Just because you're now copying large swaths of text from an LLM, doesn't make it better than copying from a person, eg plagiarism. And if you took a person's text 10 years ago, and modified a few words out of thousands, yes, that'd be called plagiarism too.
(No, a spell checker isn't that. It's correcting your word for the same word. If you think spellcheckers are the same as whole paragraph insertion, please check your ethics meter, it's broken.)
If the work isn't yours, you need to say so. Otherwise you're being dishonest.
If people get upset at the notion of disclosing, that feels like guilty behaviour. Otherwise, why not disclose?
Now, taking a step back? We're in a period of transition.
I agree that vast imbalances are being created here. This is the true problem.
For example, an application process could state "LLM applications are fine", or not. Instead?
The current is "no" without clearly saying so, for obvious reasons (it's copying work you didn't write, as your own ... plagiarism), but any such "no" without a high incident of detection and punishment, is worse than anything.
The 6 applications seems like a cop out, although it is logical. It should also be coupled with a "OK you win, use LLMs" statement too.
On another note, soon there will be two types of people, and only one of which I will engage in thoughtful email/text communication with.
Those who use LLMs, and people worth talking too.
Of what value is any meaningful conversation, if the other person's response is an LLM paste? Might as well just talk to chatgpt instead.
(note, I'm talking about friendly debate among friends or colleagues. Seeking their opinion or vice versa.)
It seems to me that the incentives are such that now you've just guaranteed that all PIs will now submit 6 applications every year.
It may be less that what you originally were seeing, but I don't know the population stats.
It also may be that you've now poisoned all the other grant agencies (NSF, etc) and they'll soon have to have maximums too.
Besides reducing the incentive to spam, this rule has had another positive effect: As a researcher without funding, you don't have to spend your whole year writing grants. You can, instead, spend your time on actual research.
With that said, NIH grants tend to me much more narrow than CS ones, and I imagine that it takes a lot more grants to keep a lab going...
[1] https://www.nsf.gov/funding/opportunities/computer-informati...