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.

  - 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

Maybe we should take away the grants from the universities and put them into autoresearch loops + human reviewers?

But my wife is finishing up her PHd and according to her: all students are using ai and pretending they are not because the PI and other older leadership treat any use of ChatGPT or similar as plagiarism and not allowed at any stage. Which I think is simply stupid.

I showed her how to use ChatGPT since Claude was blocking on all her request (biologist) and it has helped her massively improve the wording and structure of her paper as English is not a first language for her.

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.

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.

The Chalk Talk was not invented after the IBM System/360. This entire article is clearly a joke.

there's a lot of tedium in academia. ai taking menial tasks off the plates of grad students and post docs allows them to spend more time collaborating with, instead of serving, the head of the lab. dissertation defense is already a strong mitigation against producing folks like that satirical Dr. Simmons, you can't defend a dissertation if you don't have the chops for a chalk talk.

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?

It is certainly not that case that the point of these exercises is to examine how you, as a person think and approach problems.

A qualifed researcher would have had their agent perform the talk on their behalf rather than waste everyone's time.

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 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?

So, plagiarism. Daily.