Academics Need to Wake Up on AI

buffer_overlord

and web's dead baby....web's dead.

dyauspitr

Is this the new clickbait? AI written AI scare papers.

laughingcurve

As an academic this article was a fantastic position piece. I loved this and enjoyed reading it even if I didn't agree 100% thank you for sharing

34ajHa

"P.P.S. That is, entirely generated based on my artisanal, hand-crafted human social media posts and thoughts on the topic. So who wrote it, really? You tell me." We can't since it is a vapid, unsourced, AI mania fueled piece that could have been written by AI. I suppose the associate professor wants AI funding.

jdlyga

CS Academia tends to lag behind industry practices. The research frontier can be very cutting edge, but course curriculum, assignments, and institutional norms are slower and more conservative. That’s usually manageable when the shift is something like cloud adoption, new tooling, or a new dominant programming language. But this particular industry trend, use of AI in software development, is massive and fast moving (especially the agentic workflow growth over the last 6 months). And we're just now understanding where everything fits in and its limitations.

kazinator

Author doesn't seem to understand that LLM AI works by predicting tokens out of training data. The model writes a research summary because it digested academic papers and other sources in its training. When you say "AI can already do social science research better than most professors" that is false unless you mean the colloquial sense of "research" meaning "reading other people's existing stuff and paraphrasing it in my own words". But the AI doesn't even have "own words"; they are the training data's words. If all scientists suddnenly do nothing all day but play with AI --- all research grinds to a halt!

Legend2440

>7. Much of the opposition to AI is status protection dressed up as principle. Absolutely true haha, even outside of academia. Software developers wax poetic about the value of 'handcrafted human-made software', but really they just don't want to lose their cushy $300k WFH job.

ghstinda

academics are a thing of the past (ancient greece that is...) nowadays people are dumber than rocks, thank god (the expression) for AI arriving when she did.

coolThingsFirst

Nope. Ai tools are simply not there at this stage. Very useful as autocomplete and quick overview and prototyping but can’t create new knowledge at all.