More and more concern is being raised about the problems in academia that are rapidly expanding both qualitatively and quantitatively. Hardly anyone will disagree that there is a reproducibility crisis, increasing frequency of frauds and misconducts at every level. The burden of APCs is destroying the level playing field (if there was any) so that only the rich can publish in prestigious journals. The bibliographic indices have almost taken away the need to read anything, because the importance of any piece of work is gauged by the journal impact factor; the performance of any researcher by the number of papers. So nobody reads research papers anymore. Citing them does not need reading them anyway. The rapidly changing picture in academia is a perfect case of proxy failure where proxies have completely devoured the goal of research. Now asking novel questions, getting new insights and solving society’s problems is no more the goal of research. Publishing papers in prestigious journals and grabbing more and more grants is. With this a downfall of science is bound to happen, and actual downfall that has already begun is also well demonstrated by many published studies.
An additional serious concern now is AI. Of late so many researchers are using AI to write papers whose apparent quality of presentation is often better than what researchers themselves could have written. At present AI tools have many obvious flaws and they get caught red handed quite often. Incidences in which hallucinating AI cited references that did not exist have come to light. But soon AI will evolve to be better and then it will make it harder to detect flaws. In response to the first wave of AI generated papers, some journals banned them, but soon implementing such things will become impossible. An arms race of smarter frauds and smarter whistleblowers is not exactly going to be good for science.
Who will benefit the most from the more refined AI tools? Certainly the people involved in research misconduct because the frauds will become increasingly smarter and more difficult to detect as AI gets smarter.
And precisely for this reason I would welcome the use of AI in science publishing because it can get us out of the mess created by us over the last few decades. The mess has been created by the ‘publish or perish’ narratives that nurtured bad incentives. The set of bad incentives gave rise to the journal prestige rat race, the citation manipulation practices, the predatory journals as well as the prestigious robber journals exploiting the researchers’ desperation to publish. AI will help us come out of this mess not by smarter detection of fraud and misconduct, but by enhancing it and making it more and more immune to detection.
It is already become a common knowledge that many papers are being written with substantial contribution from AI. There is yet to be any example where a deep and disruptive insight is contributed by AI. The limiting factor in AI generated science is still going to be scientists who will decide to accept or reject what AI output is saying. If AI gives an output that goes against the current beliefs and opinions in the field, it is most likely to be rejected saying that sometime AI throws up junk (which might be true at times, but who knows) and we need not take every output as true. So AI will make normal routine and ritualistic science more rapid. It will give more easily and efficiently what people in a field are already expecting. But I doubt whether it will be of any help in a Kuhnian crisis.
But AI will tremendously help those who want to strengthen their CVs deceptively by increasing their number of publications, and blowing up citations. This trend will increase so sharply that it will soon collapse under its own weight. As writing papers become easier, their value in a CV will fall rapidly. Institutions will have to find alternative means to “evaluate” their candidates and employees. The clerical evaluation based on some numbers and indices will become so obviously ridiculous that it will have to give way to curious and critical evaluation which is not quantifiable and which cannot be done without efforts and expertise. Critical thinking, disruptive ideas, reproducibility will have to come to the front seat and replace bibliographic indices. Nothing can be more welcome than this. If the importance of number papers published and citation based indices vanishes, most bad incentives for fraudulent practices will vanish in no time. Paper mills and peer review mills will collapse. There can no more be profiteering either by predatory or by robber journals. The edema of science will vanish because it will be no more confused with growth. So let AI disturb, disrupt and destroy the mainstream science publishing systems and that is my only hope to save science from its rapidly declining trustworthiness.
This will certainly happen but not very smoothly. There will be a decade or more of utter crisis and chaos, which has started already. The entire credibility of academia will be at stake. People will cross question the very existence of so many people in academia drawing fat salaries and contributing nothing to real insights. If academics are prudent, they should start the process of rethinking sooner to shorten the period of crisis and chaos. Vested interests of publishers and power centers in academia will not allow this to happen so easily. There attempt will be to keep things entangled in the arms race. But there still are sensible people in science, aren’t they? The only thing sensible is to allow the current system of science publishing to get crushed under the weight of the AI assisted edema and then make a fresh beginning where HUMANS and not some computed indices make value judgments, identify, attach and appreciate real and insightful contributions to science and make a community of innately curious and investigative minds with no added incentives and rewards. Then let them take help of AI for anything. When the human rat race has vanished, AI will be tremendously useful for its positive contributions.
My science, My way 