alt Hacker NewsWho Cares Whether Academics Use AI to Write?
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I don't think "judge writing by its quality instead of its source" is coherent. Certainly, the value of reading is in the thoughts it produces in the reader's mind. So if you want me to ignore the source, you're asking me to value the thoughts I get from the writing without regard for the thoughts that produced it. This seems dubious, if not actually oxymoronic. As a reader, it feels much like you telling me to eat something you made, which you enthusiastically assure me is high quality, but which you can't be bothered to eat yourself, and in fact you've never eaten anything like it before. Plus it smells like spray-cheese.
I want to hear directly from the finest minds humanity has to offer. When I want something from AI, I'll ask AI myself. In short, I want to know when something is human-authored vs. AI-authored. It really matters to me and I suspect to others too.
This is such a great topic. On one hand academics writings are by default seen as original and a work of deep research. Unique voice of writers adds to the originality.
On the other hand AI can really be a good editor and give a final polish. But this path is fraught with danger as eventually "Editor" might turn into a "Writer"
This is something like handcrafted leather bag, quality assurance of parts like zips are okay but value lies in the craftsmanship rather than industrial production.
Another point is if writing can be done by AI, so can peer review. Then 100s of agents are just reviewing it and no real exchange of thoughts or ideas are happening. That, I feel would be a sorry state to be in
Many people here complain that AI writing is bad. And I agree with it, AI writing is boring and its distinctive tone is now associated with unpleasant thoughts for most people including me.
But I'm curious about how people will feel when AI writing is good and impossible to differentiate from a decent journalist-level writer, including with tooling. Then what? Are people going to stop reading?
I'm trying to separate the part of the argument related to "this writing is bad" from "this was written by AI".
I personally don't care if AI is a writing instrument for a human who's signing off on the content, as long as the writing is good and the source is legitimate.
Well, the problem I have with this is that I'm paying academics. At the point where they're a proxy between my money as allocated by the government and an AI provider, I no longer wish to pay them. I am capable of paying the AI provider myself. I'm not upset about the output being what it is. That's fine. I just don't care so much about the being wishing to be paid to intermediate me and the machine I am fully capable of prompting without the aid of a professional hand-holder.
> That is why the model needs far more instruction to write than to code. I deploy it for its strengths and am constantly on alert for its weaknesses, which is what makes it a tool and not a ghostwriter.
Everyone is convinced of these grand truths - that they alone have contributed something of value to the machine work. But that value is extractable by almost anyone who interrogates the machine.
Like everyone else alive, I too believe this is monocausal. This is all a problem caused primarily by a distinction between the one who sees the supposed benefit of the academic (therefore induced to pay) and the one allocating resources to the academic. It is time we remove this intermediary who does this. Should you desire to read analytical writing by a professional machine speaker there is no doubt he will gladly take your money to talk to the AI for you. Let there be a market for academia - the mathematicians can be paid for the beauty they wish to glimpse between coffees and the philosophers can prompt their machines for money.
For the rest of us, release us from this compulsory taxation so that the plumber - should he so desire - can ask Fable 5.1 "Why should I pay academics to use AI to write?" and receive a satisfactory answer without needing to pay out of his taxes a compulsory fee for an answer to a question he may never desire to ask.
Artificial intelligence systems should support our reasoning power rather than substituting our critical thinking, independent thought and reasoning power.
Why do you need academics then? Just ask the question to the LLM directly.
Me. Because I used to love reviewing conference papers and AI has utterly ruined it.
If the end result was reliably good people wouldn't be hating on it, but the vast majority of people are using AI not to elevate their output quality, but to churn out slop quantity, because that's where the incentives push them.
Anyone who actually engages with the output can tell that the speedups you get on producing good prose, maintainable codebases or high quality abstractions are much much less because you can't let the LLM go brrr, so AI output tends to be drivel, and banning it is a good way to prefilter.
It'd the same reason journals and conferences desk reject you if you don't follow their formating rules or don't use their template - it's a price of admission that ensures some consistent quality level, and if you couldn't be bothered to learn how to follow the rules, why should we trust you that the content is worth out time?
I care. I don't want to see the brute forcing of academic publication
If AI wrote it, it's not your voice. If you can't communicate your thoughts then it reflects a lack of clarity on you as the author. If you lack the clarity, AI assisted anything is probably part of the problem.
If connecting with the audience and guiding them to understand your thoughts is irrelevant, then you are missing the point of writing and being an academic.
There is a reason AI slop is revolting to read. It doesn't care.
Lets go further: Who cares wheter biological humanoids use ai to think?
"Because I was first trained as a mathematician, I probably write more like an AI than most people. But that particular article had been through 10 drafts. I worked on it with Claude Fable 5.1 and other large language models, as I now work on nearly everything, but I reviewed every line and rewrote most of them. By draft 10, I could not have said where the machine’s contribution stopped and mine began.?"
...
"The author drafted this essay in extended collaboration with Claude Fable 5.1."
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If you read a lot of journal articles, you're probably accustomed to occasionally running into articles a ways outside your bailiwick that are written poorly, you don't really understand, which you suspect made it past reviewers who didn't really understand, and indeed, you suspect the authors didn't really understand. Everyone involved just gave them the benefit of the doubt because they were too busy to figure out what the tortured language really meant. However, you don't know for sure, so you decide to leave it up to people in that particular field to deal with.
I can't speak for others, but I find AI writing to be frequently similar in its effect on me to bad writing. Yes, the grammar is correct, but it beats around the bush and puts emphasis on the wrong things. Even if you filter Claude through a human, those poor choices tend to shine through. This subtly inhuman voice switches your brain off. I suspect a lot of bad science is going to slip past reviewers because of LLM writing, and a lot of good science is going to slip past those who might need to read it, because the LLM co-written article switched their brains off and failed to make itself understood.
I understand the notion that, if the content is good enough, it shouldn't matter if the article is written poorly or co-written with AI. However, if the content is good enough, isn't it worth communicating it well?
I am on two program committees for major CS conferences this year.
LLM writing is horrible, full stop. The vast majority of papers that I see with obvious LLM writing ticks are also frankly incomprehesible. Claude's biggest sin at the moment is inventing new terminology (sometimes multiple times in a single sentence!) without stopping to explain what it means.
In previous years, I would see a substantial fraction (maybe 30-50%) of papers that were obviously written by non-native English speakers, and full of grammatical mistakes and typos. I have seen zero papers like that this year. Honestly, I preferred those: reading LLM writing is painful by comparison.
So far I have seen exactly one paper that had obvious LLM writing ticks, and yet had gone through enough passes (either of the LLM or the human authors) that the paper itself was comprehensible. So I'll admit that it's possible to do. But based on what I've seen this is vastly in the minority.
I honestly used to enjoy the review process; even when the papers were bad at least I could usually see the effort that went into it and give some constructive guidance on how to improve. The process is dramatically less pleasant now, and it's not obvious if I'm accomplishing anything: if authors who write with LLMs just stick the reviews back into those same LLMs, will they learn anything? I suspect not.
Maybe some day LLMs will be good enough to write, but as of today: please, please, just don't do it. The typos and grammatical mistakes are easier to read than the slop.
> Allison Stanger is a professor of political science at Middlebury College.
Is that so? And that's about it?
I left academia before the AI craze, but I think the answer is the same as for any other type of author/reader relationship: many human readers care! Because writing human prose is almost always an endeavor in communication from a human to a human.
Many readers want to read the thoughts of the author. Filtered only by the author.
I'm fine with using AI for code, where the quality will likely be better than those of academics.
But writing.. FFS everything I see is just AI slop. And I only realize when I start wondering why the paper is going and going and saying nothing, and then pangram tells me that everything past the intro is just AI. :/
I care more if work is reproducible. Most academics articles are "trust me bro, I am scientist", no source data, no scripts used to process them. With AI I would expect publication of prompts and harness settings.
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To be honest, people overvalue human writing too much. Even in academic research, there were quite a lot of cases where the writing was strange. I actually think AI writing is more readable, to that extent. People sometimes compare AI writing with the very best of human writing, but considering that AI writing is above average, I think it’s readable enough.
I would go even further, and say that the idea that an academic paper should be readable by humans in 2026 is strange. The abstract and the introduction should be. The rest of it, as a reader, I can extract by talking to an LLM and asking what goes on in the paper.
I have reviewed tens of papers this way by now, and one thing I'm certain of is that I get much better understanding of the paper this way. This does not save me time usually. If anything, I now spend more time reviewing a paper, but when I'm done I know more about the paper and if I need to provide feedback, it is more substantial.
I would still prefer the abstract and the intro to be written for humans, as a sanity check. But whether the authors pored over every word, every word is "theirs" does not seem to matter much. If the ideas are good they are good, and if they are bad good writing is not a way to compensate.
Two additional observations here:
* That separation of high level and technical content is not new. Conference papers for a long time now are limited to ~9 pages and Appendix, and it was a well known secret that no one ever reads the Appendix, which contained all proofs, for instance (for all practical purposes. and I did read parts, for the record). Up to now that is, now we do read it again with LLM. No point not to do it.
* There may be a finer point of whether one can separate the ideas from the language used to convey them. But I think it can, and again, we did it for a long time with the appendices.