I Wasn't Allowed Prompting ChatGPT During My Chalk Talk: This Is Discrimination (2025)

topham

"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.

handoflixue

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?

mrgoldenbrown

This is satire.

jdw64

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.

root_axis

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.

mlacks

Quite a clever way to take a jab at the cross-coast rival. Well done

im3w1l

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?

neilv

One of the better-written ones I've seen. Am sending it around to some professors.

firefoxd

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. [0]: https://getproxyai.com/ Edit: downvote from the haters, it's ok this account is managed by my proxy.

low_tech_love

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.

g42gregory

I hope people understand that this is a satire. :-)

SteinsGoat

I mean... this has to be satirical, right? Surely nobody in the field of academia is this limited in their ability....

whatsakandr

Reminds me of a sub plot from Accelerando. Wasn't a huge fan of the book but it left an impression.

krallja

> 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.

ChrisMarshallNY

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.

avaer

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 Academia did this to itself. By hiring based on volume of output/citations, the way for researchers to win is to game the system better than the next person. AI just exposes that the old power structure doesn't serve much academic purpose. Maybe we should take away the grants from the universities and put them into autoresearch loops + human reviewers?

devmor

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.

xelxebar

This is about software developers.