Professional nerd (science journalist). USian in Austria, language geek, and collector of fine yellow zigzagged sweaters and etymology fun facts. Get my newsletter about big questions at the frontiers of science: www.reviewertoo.com 👽🌀🦋
Elise Cutts
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While mostly bad, one paper of three they generated and submitted — with consent — to a conference workshop for blind human review was a resounding "meh."
It was deemed good enough to accept.
(the workshop received 43 papers for review and accepted 70%)
Here's the paper, which has been floating around as a preprint for ~2 years:
The TLDR is that some researchers (many of whom work for an AI company) made a system that uses LLMs to generate research from ideation to experimentation to paper-writing.
(for machine learning research)
So about that AI scientist paper.
If AI can generate *mediocre* science, ignoring it isn't an option.
Because "good enough" is enough to matter.
When it comes to how systems work, what breaks, what gets done, etc. cheap and "meh" can and often does push expensive and good out of its niche. 🧪
What you think of a particular language, dialect, or accent is about your attitude towards the people who use it, not some intrinsic property of the linguistic variety itself
All varieties are valid, systematic, worthy of study and respect
I see it in myself. I’m by no means at the top of my career (lol not even close) but I have the privilege of saying no to not-ideal freelance work now in a way I absolutely did not at the beginning.
So if I tell beginners to say no to bad work, am I giving them helpful advice or being a hypocrite?
Being able to say “prestige doesn’t matter, focus on doing good work and living a fulfilling life instead“ is kind of a privilege.
I mean, I feel like there’s a reason people tend to come to this realization after achieving a certain degree of career success and stability 🤔
Star Trek: The Next Generation, possibly the best television show ever, is not about spaceships shooting lasers at each other, it is about a man who represents the best of us trying to teach his robot son to be human while debating whether humans even deserve to exist with his best frenemy, God.
Pigeons laying their eggs in Saw traps is now my go-to example of how evolution works with what it's got, and is absolutely not planning ahead or "designing" towards a goal
Like how could a dinosaur have foreseen needle nests
