Hacker News Reader

Comment by low_tech_love | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

The "not really" aspect is so significant that it's barely a joke. It's more serious and thought provoking than a simple joke. I guess that's how good satire works.

This in particular I found quite interesting:

"My research is a collaboration between me and several large language models. We are co-investigators. When you ask me to explain my research without ChatGPT, you are asking me to speak on behalf of a collaborator who is not in the room. "

As people start to regard these LLMs or agents as collaborators rather than tools, it's going to become more realistic to make a statement like that. When I use a hammer, I can't ask it what type and size of nail I should use to do the job. It can only help me with the physical hammering. But when writing with an agent there is a conversation and some decision making that it is responsible for. I might go down a path that I otherwise would not have thought of on my own. And then there's the possibility that I also talk to it about my personal life and have an emotional relationship with it. I could easily see someone wanting to credit their AI agent as a recognized partner in their work.

"decision making that a chatbot is responsible for" is a pretty wild statement, though there's a few to choose from

The problem is that we want, at the same time, to allow everyone to do it (by not enforcing any rules against it) AND laugh at a satire like this as if it was ridiculous. Both things cannot happen at the same time. It’ll be some time before we acknowledge that there is no research without AI, so we’ll keep pretending it doesn’t exist, but in the meantime, we will be doing all research with AI anyway. And by the time we arrive at a scenario like the article’s, it won’t be so ridiculous anymore, because we will be used to the even more ridiculous situation of pretending we’re not doing it.

> 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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com