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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.
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.
> 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
Maybe we should take away the grants from the universities and put them into autoresearch loops + human reviewers?
The chalkboard test is useful despite textbooks existing. The point is if you can’t problem solve “in memory,” there is a latency and limit to creativity fundamentally enforced by your ability to make connections. And in the end, if all you need is ChatGPT, a grad student is cheaper.
In some fields, all of those statements are true already.
In a large number of few fields, all of those statements will be true in the near future (10 years maximum).
There's no reason that the Humboldtian model should be the right structure for the next century's universities, just as it wasn't the right structure for the 18th century's universities.
This is how you get Idiocracy instead of geniouses.
This is satire.
Honest question : does it need to be said ?
It's like the /s sign. Can some people not, for themselves, realize that this text is meant as a more or less a joke ? And before you ask, yeah, I am aware some of the people are on the spectrum, but still...
Is humor that hard to grasp on the internet ?
It likely is, but it is still uncanny to think about how much of it is actually true.
Is it making fun of people relying on ChatGPT, or is it just an exaggerated description of how she actually does research, honestly I don't know.
I hope so, but I work with people with exactly this attitude and approach.
I agree. ChatGPT told me it was most likely satire.
thank you, captain obvious
Your comment, or the post? ;)
(I'll see myself out)
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.
Edit: downvote from the haters, it's ok this account is managed by my proxy.
The TAM for ProxyAI is even bigger than SpaceX's. Hopefully they IPO soon.
> stress free
> fomo nomo
> talk walk
This is golden.
One of the better-written ones I've seen. Am sending it around to some professors.
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?
>>Instead of a human wearing an exoskeleton, an AI wearing a biological exoskeleton<<
remember this the next time you encounter a request to donate your body.
A term has already been coined for AI driving human: the reverse centaur.
This is about software developers.
Even in a couple of years, I think most devs are still going to be able to write pseudocode for a simple algorithm on a whiteboard, but anything involving real code is going to be difficult without AI. Unless you have side projects or work for a company that doesn't mandate heavy use of AI, you're going to lose your coding skills pretty quickly.
Interviews for devs will change, it'll be far more high-level/architectural, rather than testing coding ability. Live coding tasks will inevitably require prompting AI, simply because that's where things are heading.
So it is funny satire.
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.
Quite a clever way to take a jab at the cross-coast rival. Well done
> 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. Would you ask a PI to give a talk without allowing them to mention the work of their postdocs?
PI or that postdoc should be able to explain the project as such, without mentioning who exactly did what.
They must talk about colleagues when attributing to protect and create their careers.
I would guess this is a tongue-in-cheek essay (I hope), but it’s probably kind of prescient.
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.
> It is, in other words, a ritual designed in 1974 and never updated.
The Chalk Talk was not invented after the IBM System/360. This entire article is clearly a joke.
I hope people understand that this is a satire. :-)
Reminds me of a sub plot from Accelerando. Wasn't a huge fan of the book but it left an impression.
She had me for the first 300 milliseconds. Very funny.
Ah yes, and I wasn’t allowed a google search during my whiteboard interview, which was totally also discrimination.
It is certainly not that case that the point of these exercises is to examine how you, as a person think and approach problems.
academia will (hopefully) be an industry that benefits from, rather than degraded or obsoleted by, ai. the system should self-correct. scientists that use ai to give themselves more time to think will succeed and scientists that use ai to avoid thinking will fail. over the next few years processes and pedagogies should develop that help reliably guide researchers toward success.
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.
Loved it!
"The Evolution of Human Science"
Strawman takes a hit AND IT GOES DOWN!!
I mean... this has to be satirical, right? Surely nobody in the field of academia is this limited in their ability....
It's actually embarrassing that she thought all that prompting would have been acceptable during the talk.
A qualifed researcher would have had their agent perform the talk on their behalf rather than waste everyone's time.
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?
"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."
So, plagiarism. Daily.
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.