How Agentic AI Blows the Foundation of Modern Academia to Bits
"the very foundation of modern academia has been blown to bits"
I trace the evolution of research from physical libraries to Google Scholar and now to agentic AI, which can generate passable PhD theses instantly. With oral defenses rarely failing and the quality bar often lower than imagined, the traditional path to a doctorate is collapsing. The very foundation of modern academia has been wiped out by technology that allows anyone to produce a thesis with the push of a button.
The very foundation of modern academia has been blown to bits. Not shaken. Wiped out.
- hamburgererror
I've seen a student using ChatGPT for almost everything in his PhD (in engineering). You have some data but you don't know what kind of statistical analysis tool to use? Ask ChatGPT. Code for the analysis? ChatGPT. How do you interpret the results? ChatGPT.
And so on. I could bet that some of his scientific questions where generated, and that's no surprise to me, it's just SO easy this way and if the PhD advisor just says "ok that's good" and no one ever complain during the PhD defense then for sure this will keep going.
But regarding OP's link, when Lemire says I kept my mouth shut. I am never rude on purpose. You can't say that and complain that academia "is blown to bits". It's your responsibility as a scientist to step up and say that some research is garbage when you see it.
- Chance-Device
We’re at the point of learning that some things that used to matter no longer do, and some things we used to think mattered never did. It’s a going to be a shock to everyone, and this same phenomenon is happening everywhere, not just academia or software engineering.
My bet: a lot of the things we used to do were habit, ceremony and gatekeeping much more than being necessities.
- yk
The author is a mathematician and I think to a certain extend the tweet reflects the current panic among (some) mathematicians. So ~~second sentence~~ third paragraph the claim that somehow ai could right now write a phd in physics or sociology is something we don't observe (at the moment). What we observe is, that ai can find counter examples to well established conjectures in mathematics quite well, but the thing is the other fields don't have the kind of well established riddles that currently produce the flashy results in mathematics.
- delis-thumbs-7e
- this_user
I am not sure what point the author is even trying to make here. On the one hand, he seems to complain about how AI has virtually made the traditionally PhD thesis obsolete, but on the other hand, he also states:
> Consider that most PhD theses were never good. How often do you rush to read a PhD thesis? The vast majority of them are painful to read. You learn little if anything.
So, it sounds like nothing of much value has been lost.
I think what he really complains about is that AI is starting to show that the emperor called academia has no clothes. So much of working your way through that system has always been about being able to master largely pointless rituals.
Yet, the people on the inside have no interest in making any improvements, because academia has always been institutionally conservative. But now AI is starting to put pressure on them to rethink their way of doing things, and they really don't like it.