Ethan Mollick: Astra generates accurate papers in hours, but has zero research taste
emollick · x · 2026-09-04
Ethan Mollick tasked Astra with conducting original entrepreneurship research: finding online datasets and pre-registering hypotheses. It produced multiple beautifully formatted, technically correct papers within a couple of hours each.
The catch: the papers were correct but boring. "No research taste," he writes — the papers weren't slop, just uninteresting. He argues that solving for research taste remains a hard problem for AIs, even with careful prompting.
Related event: Astra Writes Flawless Papers but Lacks Research Taste, Mollick Finds(3 posts)→
More from AGI Musings
- Richard Socher: AI could compress a century of scientific breakthroughs into a decade — RichardSocher · 2026-10-21
- Ethan Mollick: AI's work capacity doubled 8 times in 30 months, METR benchmark maxed out — One Useful Thing (Ethan Mollick) · 2026-10-20
- Time for Guardrails on Government Too: Rethinking Who AI Policy Constrains — neil_chilson · 2026-10-20
- Steam needs real quality control on AI slop, not an AI art ban, argues designer — AIandDesign · 2026-10-20
- Why personal AI agents fall into a retention dead zone between dopamine and infrastructure — signulll · 2026-10-20
- Scholar writes AI-assisted book on storytelling values, work nominated for EMNLP best paper — _akpiper · 2026-10-20