low_tech_love

To be honest I’m surprised, I actually like them, even though they are obviously reductions to the average, bland repetitions of stuff that’s been done over and over again. That’s not necessarily a criticism, I know that’s what AI is and we should not expect more. And of course a small event with little budget does not need more than that (although of course you could think of something more unique if you wanted).

What scares me is what happens after we park on these ideas for years/decades because they are cheap and fast and just good enough. Will anyone take the time and effort to continue being creative?

Here is my suggestion: scale the “difficulty” to the same rate as the submissions. Instruct the reviewers like this: “this year we had 10x the average submissions of the last 5 years, so be 10x stricter than you would normally.”

Another idea: make it less about the written word and more about artifacts. Require more proof, more protocols, more spreadsheets, more code, etc.

And stop caring about the words so much, as they really don’t mean anything anymore. Larger papers should be punished instead of rewarded; the shorter the paper (in terms of words) the higher the chance to be published. Every word should be backed up by data, code, etc. Any paragraph that doesn’t pair with proof should mean rejection.

Ok but what you described is very different than being forced to review if you submit. If anyone who submits a paper has to review that is just ridiculous. There is no requirement for submitting a paper.

It’s important to notice that flagged papers were still accepted; anyone who spends any time around researchers knows the fact that most people are salivating over AI. That’s why they don’t want to punish it, they’re also using it. And they don’t want to create an environment where it is overly punished, at least not while they can take advantage of it. There is only a small amount of serious people complaining, but in my experience the opinion of the vast majority is “stop worrying and learn to love it”. Which brings to the surface a very harsh reality: almost nobody gave a damn about the science to begin with.

This is the truth. As a researcher, I say good riddance. It was always kinda stupid, AI is just accelerating the demise of something that hasn’t worked correctly for a few decades now. The time is way overdue for us to figure out some other system.

“…because conferences have made it mandatory to review 4-5 papers if you submit to them.”

Is that really a thing? So if I submit a legit paper it is being reviewed forcefully by a bunch of random people from god knows where?

You are arguing that creativity is still alive by showing creative works from before AI? I think your argument is backwards.

Hey, I gotta say that reading your actual original words feels much more interesting than whatever is that artificial slop on your website!

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.

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.

Why would you bother telling them it’s satire?

To be honest, given the overwhelming (and unfair, and unreasonable) pressure against them from the Leviathan, which the other companies do not have to deal with, they’re doing pretty damn good. In my mind the trust has actually increased that they can handle bad times and still push forward.

Let me guess, somebody magically set some huge bets on poly and stock market 5 minutes before the announcement ?