Anybody else notice that half the video was just finding papers to decorate the bibliography with? Not like "find me more papers I should read and consider", but "find papers that are relevant that I should cite--okay, just add those".

This is all pageantry.

Yes. That part of the video was straight-up "here's how to automate academic fraud". Those papers could just as easily negate one of your assumptions. What even is research if it's not using cited works?

"I know nothing but had an idea and did some work. I have no clue whether this question has been explored or settled one way or another. But here's my new paper claiming to be an incremental improvement on... whatever the previous state of understanding was. I wouldn't know, I haven't read up on it yet. Too many papers to write."

It's as if it's marketed to the students who have been using ChatGPT for the last few years to pass courses and now need to throw together a bachelor's thesis. Bibliography and proper citation requirements are a pain.

I've noticed this pattern, and it really drives me nuts. You should really be doing a comprehensive literature review before starting any sort of review or research paper.

We removed the authorship of a a former co-author on a paper I'm on because his workflow was essentially this--with AI generated text--and a not-insignificant amount of straight-up plagiarism.

Plus, this practice (just inserting AI-proposed citations/sources) is what has recently been the front-runner of some very embarrassing "editing" mistakes, notably in reports from public institutions. Now OpenAI lets us do pageantry even faster! <3

It's all performance over practice at this point. Look to the current US administration as the barometer by which many are measuring their public perceptions

A more apt example would have been to show finding a particular paper you want to cite, but you don’t want to be bothered searching your reference manager or Google Scholar.

E.g. “cite that paper from John Doe on lorem ipsum, but make sure it’s the 2022 update article that I cited in one of my other recent articles, not the original article”

I chuckled at that part too!

Didn't even open a single one of the papers to look at them! Just said that one is not relevant without even opening it.

The hand-drawn diagram to LaTeX is a little embarrassing. If you load up Prism and create your first blank project you can see the image. It looks like it's actually a LaTeX rendering of a diagram rendered with a hand-dawn style and then overlayed on a very clean image of a napkin. So you've proven that you can go from a rasterized LaTeX diagram back to equivalent LaTeX code. Interesting but probably will not hold up when it meets real world use cases.

You may notice that this is the way writing papers works in undergraduate courses. It's just another in a long line of examples of MBA tech bros gleaning an extremely surface-level understanding of a topic, then decided they're experts.