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: Ethan Mollick Tests Astra: Solid Papers, Boring Topics(2 posts)→
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