"prepared to do what I do every single day in my actual scientific practice: type a prompt and receive a coherent, well-structured response that I would then lightly edit and present as my own thinking."
Calling it "Discrimination" is obviously absurd but if the process produces useful results, one ought to seriously consider whether it might be worth switching.
I understand we have always conventionally transported goods by horse. Yes, this employee knows nothing about horses, and in fact is rather spooked by them, but we've checked! Their claim to be able to transport goods faster, without a horse, somehow seems to hold up.
Maybe, just maybe, we should take this whole "truck" concept seriously?
But honestly, I think it makes sense. In my experience with programming, when it comes to building and delivering software, it's not really about memorization. Honestly, search ability has been far more important. Wouldn't it be fair to think of AI as just another search ability?
What I'm curious about is this: in the end, experts are the ones who are best at distinguishing hallucinations. If you can just search with GPT and tell the difference, wouldn't that be enough? I can't imagine memorizing thousands or tens of thousands of lines.
I have ADHD, and when I get nervous, I tend to forget what I was going to say, so it's even more true for me.
I see this text as more open ended than a warning. It's a description of a possible future for us to contemplate. Does it have good points does it have bad points? Being satire, the protagonist is a strawman of course, but doesn't she also have some good points? It's not easy to tell where exactly the author stands where, the true argument stops and the satire begins. That's not necessarily a flaw because it doesn't actually really matter where the author stands for our ability to discuss the subject.
Scientist as prompter? Yes it seems fairly likely. But to what extent and how quickly will it happen? Surely scientists will still be able to at least give an outline of "their" work even in the future? Maybe?
Otherwise maybe we it will be a sort of inversion of control, where the language model is the supervisor, and the humans in the loop are more like research assistants doing the dirty work? Instead of a human wearing an exoskeleton, an AI wearing a biological exoskeleton? But this can only be a temporary state of affairs as we won't be needed for that forever.
A scientific project without human involvement? If a paper is published in a journal and no human wrote it and no human read it, is it really science? Does it really advance knowledge. Probably?
Do note that this was written in December 2025, and we have experienced leaps in capabilities since then. Her methods are outdated. Since January, I've been employed at 3 jobs, fulltime, by using ProxyAI [0]. I'm Chair in several universities. For all I know, I'm also part of several projects.
Don't let this kind of blatant discrimination affect you. The future is bright.
Note: the service is free once you give it access to your bank account.
It’s a joke and all but also not really? You might have to go do a chalk talk at some point, and that is basically the only part of this article that is actually not real. The rest (about how everyone in academia is prompting everything) is absolutely VERY real.
The word around all the scientific communities which I’m in contact with (to be honest, not so many) is basically “oh, there is no way to stop it, so we’ll embrace it”. All the conferences which I’m active in (say a handful of them) are just pretending nothing is happening and dealing only with blatant and obvious exaggerated cases. If you’re good at prompting, you’ll prompt, and there is no way in hell someone that doesn’t prompt has any chance at all at, well, anything academic really.
> If you’re good at prompting, you’ll prompt, and there is no way in hell someone that doesn’t prompt has any chance at all at, well, anything academic really.
This is far too bleak a view. I've been doing a wide range of academic writing, from journal papers to successful Horizon Europe grant applications, for the past 15 years. And it's no more difficult to achieve success today with 100% non-AI contributions than it was in the before times.
In fact, some of the most difficult parts of science - building relations, collaborations and consortia; formulating new hypotheses that are actually interesting and will get you noticed; giving convincing presentations on stage; are things AI is terrible/useless at.
A funny piece, but what if all of the following are true:
- AI *is* how real research is done
- Incentives are such that this is how researchers must work
- Academia institution does not have a structure to accept this reality
Academia did this to itself. By hiring based on volume of output/citations, the way for researchers to win is to game the system better than the next person. AI just exposes that the old power structure doesn't serve much academic purpose.
Maybe we should take away the grants from the universities and put them into autoresearch loops + human reviewers?
37 comments
[ 5.4 ms ] story [ 69.8 ms ] threadSo, plagiarism. Daily.
I understand we have always conventionally transported goods by horse. Yes, this employee knows nothing about horses, and in fact is rather spooked by them, but we've checked! Their claim to be able to transport goods faster, without a horse, somehow seems to hold up.
Maybe, just maybe, we should take this whole "truck" concept seriously?
What I'm curious about is this: in the end, experts are the ones who are best at distinguishing hallucinations. If you can just search with GPT and tell the difference, wouldn't that be enough? I can't imagine memorizing thousands or tens of thousands of lines.
I have ADHD, and when I get nervous, I tend to forget what I was going to say, so it's even more true for me.
A qualifed researcher would have had their agent perform the talk on their behalf rather than waste everyone's time.
Scientist as prompter? Yes it seems fairly likely. But to what extent and how quickly will it happen? Surely scientists will still be able to at least give an outline of "their" work even in the future? Maybe?
Otherwise maybe we it will be a sort of inversion of control, where the language model is the supervisor, and the humans in the loop are more like research assistants doing the dirty work? Instead of a human wearing an exoskeleton, an AI wearing a biological exoskeleton? But this can only be a temporary state of affairs as we won't be needed for that forever.
A scientific project without human involvement? If a paper is published in a journal and no human wrote it and no human read it, is it really science? Does it really advance knowledge. Probably?
Don't let this kind of blatant discrimination affect you. The future is bright.
Note: the service is free once you give it access to your bank account.
[0]: https://getproxyai.com/
Edit: downvote from the haters, it's ok this account is managed by my proxy.
> fomo nomo
> talk walk
This is golden.
The word around all the scientific communities which I’m in contact with (to be honest, not so many) is basically “oh, there is no way to stop it, so we’ll embrace it”. All the conferences which I’m active in (say a handful of them) are just pretending nothing is happening and dealing only with blatant and obvious exaggerated cases. If you’re good at prompting, you’ll prompt, and there is no way in hell someone that doesn’t prompt has any chance at all at, well, anything academic really.
This is far too bleak a view. I've been doing a wide range of academic writing, from journal papers to successful Horizon Europe grant applications, for the past 15 years. And it's no more difficult to achieve success today with 100% non-AI contributions than it was in the before times.
In fact, some of the most difficult parts of science - building relations, collaborations and consortia; formulating new hypotheses that are actually interesting and will get you noticed; giving convincing presentations on stage; are things AI is terrible/useless at.
Right.
> Surely nobody in the field of academia is this limited in their ability....
Wrong.
The Chalk Talk was not invented after the IBM System/360. This entire article is clearly a joke.
I’m old enough to remember when calculators were banned from classrooms, for almost the exact same reasons that people are giving against AI.
It’s really only a matter of time.
Maybe we should take away the grants from the universities and put them into autoresearch loops + human reviewers?
It is certainly not that case that the point of these exercises is to examine how you, as a person think and approach problems.