<< << My own words? I haven’t used my own words since 2022. I’m not even sure I have my own words anymore.
I thought about you wrote and I think you are right. Even though I am partial to author's POV ( despite some obvious, glaring issues ), I can't help feeling of two minds about it all. I don't want to undermine existing ecosystem, but then.. the existing ecosystem in research may need some decent shake up.
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.
The "not really" aspect is so significant that it's barely a joke. It's more serious and thought provoking than a simple joke. I guess that's how good satire works.
This in particular I found quite interesting:
"My research is a collaboration between me and several large language models. We are co-investigators. When you ask me to explain my research without ChatGPT, you are asking me to speak on behalf of a collaborator who is not in the room. "
As people start to regard these LLMs or agents as collaborators rather than tools, it's going to become more realistic to make a statement like that. When I use a hammer, I can't ask it what type and size of nail I should use to do the job. It can only help me with the physical hammering. But when writing with an agent there is a conversation and some decision making that it is responsible for. I might go down a path that I otherwise would not have thought of on my own. And then there's the possibility that I also talk to it about my personal life and have an emotional relationship with it. I could easily see someone wanting to credit their AI agent as a recognized partner in their work.
It's like the /s sign. Can some people not, for themselves, realize that this text is meant as a more or less a joke ? And before you ask, yeah, I am aware some of the people are on the spectrum, but still...
Yes, it does need to be said. Many people will read this article and miss the satire, which is, in part, the intent of sophisticated satire. The point is that it is outlandish and foolish and ridiculous and yet still resembles some serious discourse that real people engage in. So much so that some onlookers can't tell the difference. That proves the satirist's thesis: the real world is full of ridiculous people making ridiculous arguments and they can't even see themselves or their arguments for what they are.
I know real life people who write essays with claims as outlandish as "software engineering is an ableist field" and are dead serious. But that assertion belongs just as well in a satire piece. It can be very hard to tell if you don't have prior context for the author.
When I started reading it I thought for far too long that this person is actually stupi^H^H^H^H^H serious. So writing that it is satire is useful for people that do not read enough of the text, and just jump into the comments :) Also, this type of behavior has little to do with the neurodivergent spectrum, if anything it touches personality types, maybe maybe some trauma or addiction, unlikely to be caused by anything in the affective space (episodes would be too short) or psychosis space.
same, i didn't catch the satire and eventually got tired of the stupidity. the thing is, a lot of people around me are using AI like the person in the story. and they are entirely serious. they are not scientists but they could be writing this article and actually mean it.
I think sometimes it is but only if the humor relies on a tone.
When it’s satire I think the main blocker of recognition is if you have an emotional reaction first.
As an example, if you are a diehard AI influencer or something you might miss the joke entirely because of the severity of your initial negative reaction.
Just my two cents. Glad I could contribute to completely beating the humor out of this post :)
It does, but unfortunately, this is in-crowd communication -- it's too high brow to hit anyone that needs to read it. But I enjoyed it, and I'm sure it was cathartic to write
Humor died few years ago after series of increasingly more improbable events happening. "USA voted pedophile that bankrupted 3 casinos into second term" was stuff out of Onion decade ago, so some researcher walking into job interview with ChatGPT doesn't even move a needle on satire scale.
Yes. Humor is very hard to grasp via text, especially sarcastic humor, because in person we use voice and body language to signal that something is meant as a joke.
While it is true humor is hard to grasp in text, it has been done that way for millenia in books, and it continued to work as it should. Actually, the fact that it is sometimes misunderstood as non-humor is for the better.
As someone on the spectrum, I can assure you that being on the spectrum is not an obstacle for understanding this kind of humor.
In fact, is the neurotypicals who struggle getting it because they rely on nonverbal cues (like a sarcastic tone of voice), which is missing in text, to detect humor.
Deadpan, dry humor is generally more amenable to the autistic mind, because it doesn't have what we consider noise.
If someone needs a laugh track to tell that something is a joke, then either it's a bad joke that wouldn't be made any better with a laugh track, or the problem exists between keyboard and chair.
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.
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?
I don't think the argument is necessarily against the use of the tools entirely. My interpretation is that it's against delegating to them all understanding.
Humans can only usefully steer LLMs if they have some understanding or context the LLMs do not.
Put another way: if all that you're doing is prompting the AI and giving me the result then I have no use for you. If you're not contributing insight, understanding, experience, or creativity then it's far cheaper for me to prompt the AI myself.
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?
I didn't mean it in the literal sense more like the AI is telling you do this do this do this do that and you relaying what happened and what you saw over text.
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.
> Wouldn't it be fair to think of AI as just another search ability?
If you're asking it questions, yes. It's like search but with a simulation of understanding and information synthesis far faster than a human can perform it.
If you're having it write your code, no. It's like a junior developer who has no awareness of the bigger picture, of incompatibilities, of understanding that hasn't been contained and can't be derived from the codebase.
> If you can just search with GPT and tell the difference, wouldn't that be enough?
The situation the satire is describing is an individual who is unable to tell the difference. The way the scenario is laid out, everything she's 'accomplished' has been to prompt ChatGPT and publish its answers with some degree of editing; it's clear that she, as an individual, is not an expert, does not understand the thing she is presenting, and does not know any of what she has purported to know. This is also a sadly common refrain these days.
> I can't imagine memorizing thousands or tens of thousands of lines.
It's not about memorizing thousands of lines of text; it's about demonstrating to the panel that you have an understanding of the thing you're claiming to have an understanding of.
I work with a lot of software and infrastructure at work. I can tell you how it all (or most of it) works together and interacts. I could not reproduce the configurations of any of the software from memory, nor recite any of the code, but I have an understanding of the system, how it works, what it was designed for, and what choices were made and why.
The professor in this article does not have any of that understanding. It would be as if I had Claude deploy a cluster of X, Y, Z components, configure them, and get them online, and then put on my resume that I had done it. It was accomplished as result of me, but if I don't understand the system then there's no difference between me doing it and the CEO doing it, or my son, or someone from Taskrabbit.
So yeah, it's not about memorization, it's about understanding.
"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."
75% through: Ok, this is a great bit of satire, but this reads uncomfortably like many of the non-joke discussions I've seen around software development over the past year.
But when humans do it suddenly it's "standing on the shoulders of giants"
I don't get how you can possibly call it plagiarism if it produce a novel breakthrough - by definition, the existing knowledge base doesn't contain the new ideas generated in this process.
But, literally typing in a prompt and then massaging its output and then claiming ownership of its plan? Yeah, no.
It doesn't matter if the original article is supposed to be satire. I've been using AI to do some coding, I've been using it to help me plan a much larger project. It's a tool, and it's useful; but I am in control of the project, not letting the AI control me.
Meanwhile in my day job, I've had multiple coworkers pump shit into AI and regurgitate the answer without critical thought. They are letting it make decisions for them without validating it first even.
It's not really satire if we're already dealing with this attitude.
Reminds me of a sub plot from Accelerando. Wasn't a huge fan of the book but it left an impression.
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.
It's a joke.
So is my comment.
<< << My own words? I haven’t used my own words since 2022. I’m not even sure I have my own words anymore.
I thought about you wrote and I think you are right. Even though I am partial to author's POV ( despite some obvious, glaring issues ), I can't help feeling of two minds about it all. I don't want to undermine existing ecosystem, but then.. the existing ecosystem in research may need some decent shake up.
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.
The "not really" aspect is so significant that it's barely a joke. It's more serious and thought provoking than a simple joke. I guess that's how good satire works.
This in particular I found quite interesting:
"My research is a collaboration between me and several large language models. We are co-investigators. When you ask me to explain my research without ChatGPT, you are asking me to speak on behalf of a collaborator who is not in the room. "
As people start to regard these LLMs or agents as collaborators rather than tools, it's going to become more realistic to make a statement like that. When I use a hammer, I can't ask it what type and size of nail I should use to do the job. It can only help me with the physical hammering. But when writing with an agent there is a conversation and some decision making that it is responsible for. I might go down a path that I otherwise would not have thought of on my own. And then there's the possibility that I also talk to it about my personal life and have an emotional relationship with it. I could easily see someone wanting to credit their AI agent as a recognized partner in their work.
This is satire.
Honest question : does it need to be said ?
It's like the /s sign. Can some people not, for themselves, realize that this text is meant as a more or less a joke ? And before you ask, yeah, I am aware some of the people are on the spectrum, but still...
Is humor that hard to grasp on the internet ?
Yes, it does need to be said. Many people will read this article and miss the satire, which is, in part, the intent of sophisticated satire. The point is that it is outlandish and foolish and ridiculous and yet still resembles some serious discourse that real people engage in. So much so that some onlookers can't tell the difference. That proves the satirist's thesis: the real world is full of ridiculous people making ridiculous arguments and they can't even see themselves or their arguments for what they are.
I know real life people who write essays with claims as outlandish as "software engineering is an ableist field" and are dead serious. But that assertion belongs just as well in a satire piece. It can be very hard to tell if you don't have prior context for the author.
Among others, the voices on the internet include:
* some sincere people with very extreme takes,
* some trolls that masquerade as the above, to bully others over their credulousness and lack of guile, which is distinct from sarcasm,
* some trolls that insincerely speak anything that earns engagement,
* and more and more bots that mimic the above
So sadly, the answer to your question is generally yes.
> Honest question : does it need to be said ?
Yes. There are literally people who believe any thinking done without AI is Luddite and subpar.
These are not, in my experience, people who have done any great thinking in their lives. They do tend to tweet a lot.
Why would you bother telling them it’s satire?
When I started reading it I thought for far too long that this person is actually stupi^H^H^H^H^H serious. So writing that it is satire is useful for people that do not read enough of the text, and just jump into the comments :) Also, this type of behavior has little to do with the neurodivergent spectrum, if anything it touches personality types, maybe maybe some trauma or addiction, unlikely to be caused by anything in the affective space (episodes would be too short) or psychosis space.
same, i didn't catch the satire and eventually got tired of the stupidity. the thing is, a lot of people around me are using AI like the person in the story. and they are entirely serious. they are not scientists but they could be writing this article and actually mean it.
I was honestly unsure until the Netflix password bit gave it away...
> Honest question : does it need to be said ?
At the current time I'm writing this, all other top-level comments are engaging with the article as if it were sincere. So, yes.
I think sometimes it is but only if the humor relies on a tone.
When it’s satire I think the main blocker of recognition is if you have an emotional reaction first.
As an example, if you are a diehard AI influencer or something you might miss the joke entirely because of the severity of your initial negative reaction.
Just my two cents. Glad I could contribute to completely beating the humor out of this post :)
No, no, dissecting humor to death is the funnest part of the experience :D
(I, too, am autistic)
i think you may enjoy:
45 Different Types of Humor with Examples in 2026
https://humornama.com/featured/education/types-of-humor/
When it's this poorly executed, yes it needs to be said.
I was going back and forth on whether it was for far longer than I should have been.
> When it's this poorly executed, yes it needs to be said
Isn't that a mark of great satire? That the argument sort of works within the zeitgeist, thereby showing the zeitgeist to be corrupted.
Over-the-top satire is funny. But it's clumsy. The fact that some people who are being satirised will agree with the satire is what makes it great.
It does, but unfortunately, this is in-crowd communication -- it's too high brow to hit anyone that needs to read it. But I enjoyed it, and I'm sure it was cathartic to write
Yes because Poe’s Law has never been more true than the current era.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
How wow, it even has a name and a wikipedia article...
Guess that makes it official then. We are all automatons pretending to be flesh :-)
I regularly get reddit comments downvoted by people who don't recognize it's obviously satire.
Sometimes somebody else comments "why is this getting downvoted, it's satire", and that stops or reverses the influx of downvotes.
Humor died few years ago after series of increasingly more improbable events happening. "USA voted pedophile that bankrupted 3 casinos into second term" was stuff out of Onion decade ago, so some researcher walking into job interview with ChatGPT doesn't even move a needle on satire scale.
do LLMs dream of electric shhhheeep
> Is humor that hard to grasp on the internet ?
Yes. Humor is very hard to grasp via text, especially sarcastic humor, because in person we use voice and body language to signal that something is meant as a joke.
While it is true humor is hard to grasp in text, it has been done that way for millenia in books, and it continued to work as it should. Actually, the fact that it is sometimes misunderstood as non-humor is for the better.
And because we typically know enough about a person to tell if the opinion they expressed is consistent with their believes.
On this site? Yes it does, and even then we have people missing the point in the comments.
As someone on the spectrum, I can assure you that being on the spectrum is not an obstacle for understanding this kind of humor.
In fact, is the neurotypicals who struggle getting it because they rely on nonverbal cues (like a sarcastic tone of voice), which is missing in text, to detect humor.
Deadpan, dry humor is generally more amenable to the autistic mind, because it doesn't have what we consider noise.
If someone needs a laugh track to tell that something is a joke, then either it's a bad joke that wouldn't be made any better with a laugh track, or the problem exists between keyboard and chair.
I hope so, but I work with people with exactly this attitude and approach.
That’s what makes it good satire.
It likely is, but it is still uncanny to think about how much of it is actually true.
Is it making fun of people relying on ChatGPT, or is it just an exaggerated description of how she actually does research, honestly I don't know.
That's what makes it good satire.
But if you honestly think that someone applying for a postdoc can't explain what their research is about, it's on you.
I agree. ChatGPT told me it was most likely satire.
thank you, captain obvious
Your comment, or the post? ;) (I'll see myself out)
I hope people understand that this is a satire. :-)
I mean... this has to be satirical, right? Surely nobody in the field of academia is this limited in their ability....
Quite a clever way to take a jab at the cross-coast rival. Well done
One of the better-written ones I've seen. Am sending it around to some professors.
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.
The TAM for ProxyAI is even bigger than SpaceX's. Hopefully they IPO soon.
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?
I don't think the argument is necessarily against the use of the tools entirely. My interpretation is that it's against delegating to them all understanding.
Humans can only usefully steer LLMs if they have some understanding or context the LLMs do not.
Put another way: if all that you're doing is prompting the AI and giving me the result then I have no use for you. If you're not contributing insight, understanding, experience, or creativity then it's far cheaper for me to prompt the AI myself.
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?
>>Instead of a human wearing an exoskeleton, an AI wearing a biological exoskeleton<<
remember this the next time you encounter a request to donate your body.
I didn't mean it in the literal sense more like the AI is telling you do this do this do this do that and you relaying what happened and what you saw over text.
i thought so, but i ran with it.
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.
> Wouldn't it be fair to think of AI as just another search ability?
If you're asking it questions, yes. It's like search but with a simulation of understanding and information synthesis far faster than a human can perform it.
If you're having it write your code, no. It's like a junior developer who has no awareness of the bigger picture, of incompatibilities, of understanding that hasn't been contained and can't be derived from the codebase.
> If you can just search with GPT and tell the difference, wouldn't that be enough?
The situation the satire is describing is an individual who is unable to tell the difference. The way the scenario is laid out, everything she's 'accomplished' has been to prompt ChatGPT and publish its answers with some degree of editing; it's clear that she, as an individual, is not an expert, does not understand the thing she is presenting, and does not know any of what she has purported to know. This is also a sadly common refrain these days.
> I can't imagine memorizing thousands or tens of thousands of lines.
It's not about memorizing thousands of lines of text; it's about demonstrating to the panel that you have an understanding of the thing you're claiming to have an understanding of.
I work with a lot of software and infrastructure at work. I can tell you how it all (or most of it) works together and interacts. I could not reproduce the configurations of any of the software from memory, nor recite any of the code, but I have an understanding of the system, how it works, what it was designed for, and what choices were made and why.
The professor in this article does not have any of that understanding. It would be as if I had Claude deploy a cluster of X, Y, Z components, configure them, and get them online, and then put on my resume that I had done it. It was accomplished as result of me, but if I don't understand the system then there's no difference between me doing it and the CEO doing it, or my son, or someone from Taskrabbit.
So yeah, it's not about memorization, it's about understanding.
You can bring notes to a chalk talk.
"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.
This is satire
Replace science with software development and this just reads like half of HN right now.
My thought process in engaging with the post was:
Reading the title: I hope this is a joke.
First paragraph in: Oh, good, it is a joke.
75% through: Ok, this is a great bit of satire, but this reads uncomfortably like many of the non-joke discussions I've seen around software development over the past year.
despite being satire this is no joke, this is what we are headed into if we dont stop the decline.
I think that's what the satire is trying to warn against.
What’s going on with social queues today where so many people here are not immediately understanding this is clearly satire?
I think this thread is a good indicator of llm bots vs human accounts on HN. The bots couldn't identify satire.
But when humans do it suddenly it's "standing on the shoulders of giants"
I don't get how you can possibly call it plagiarism if it produce a novel breakthrough - by definition, the existing knowledge base doesn't contain the new ideas generated in this process.
And we've proven it can handle complex, novel thinking when it solved a significant Erdos problem back in May: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-just-solved-an...
I don't have a problem using AI.
I also acknowledge, when doing so, how I use it.
But, literally typing in a prompt and then massaging its output and then claiming ownership of its plan? Yeah, no.
It doesn't matter if the original article is supposed to be satire. I've been using AI to do some coding, I've been using it to help me plan a much larger project. It's a tool, and it's useful; but I am in control of the project, not letting the AI control me.
Meanwhile in my day job, I've had multiple coworkers pump shit into AI and regurgitate the answer without critical thought. They are letting it make decisions for them without validating it first even.
It's not really satire if we're already dealing with this attitude.