Economist warns: AI summaries are quietly steering young researchers astray
paulnovosad · x · 2026-10-15
Economist Paul Novosad flags a pernicious pattern among early-career researchers: instead of reading papers, they read AI summaries; instead of writing out and working through ideas, they talk to AI and get led in bland, AI-like directions.
His core point: outsourcing writing means absorbing the model's mediocre judgment about what matters, and getting convinced it's "good enough" — a hard-to-remove tell unless you commit to heavy rewriting.
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