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.

You seem to assume a case where academics write papers by single shotting from one prompt. Of course such papers are useless, but this is not how I at least use LLMs to write. I iterate the text in thousands of turns. I do tend to type all the final text in the manuscript too, sometimes editing it in the process. My current manuscript's session has about about 50k input tokens by me in about 1.6k individual messages. The manuscript currently is about 8k words (11k tokens). In total the session has about 50M tokens.

One frustrating, and very inefficient, part of the (lack of) division of labour in academia is that everyone has to write. And academic text has very particular format and demads, and writing it is a skill of its own. It's like asking that every software dev should be also be technical writers and write production level user manuals and ad copys on top.

And a lot more things than the writing goes into the paper. Designing, implementing and conducting the experiments. Studying, visualizing and analyzing the data. Interpreting the results in light of theory and previous literature. None of these require writing in the sense of writing a paper.

I would be ecstatic, and be a lot less wasteful in spending grant money, if I could stop wasting time writing the research in papers, and instead dump a git repo with some READMEs. But at least for now I have to also write the papers, but with LLMs maybe at 2x speed and with a lot less bad output.

> I am capable of paying the AI provider myself.

If that was true then slack, linear, … would be out of business.

Yes, anyone can pay the provider, but not everyone can ask the right questions, followup, generally give the question the attention it deserves.

There are heaps of problems with academia, and poor writing is just one of them. It existed pre AI. Whoever produced slop pre-AI now produces more of it. The good ones still stand out.