Stephen Downes

I'm sure a lot of the articles I've been reviewing for OLDaily are AI-authored, though it is getting increasingly difficult to tell. In a certain sense, it doesn't matter, because what I'm always interested in is whether the content is accurate, clearly expressed, and in some sense novel (by that, I mean 'novel to me', which leaves a lot of room for both humans and AIs). This article passes the test, though many readers won't like the message: "AI can already do social science research better than most professors... (and) The academic paper is a dead format walking." It's the same thing for academic papers as it is for software: we can produce a high-quality paper in a few minutes with AI. So why on earth would we pay any money for one? Now there's still a bit of a supply-chain issue: if the AI is to stay current it needs input from somewhere. But probably not from academic papers. Via Paul Prinsloo, who I can just envision walking around muttering to himself after reading this.