Mathematician's essay: AI made papers a commodity, academia must rebuild its metrics
Pseudomanifold · x · 2026-10-22
A long essay "Quo Vadis, Academia?" from bastian.rieck.me. After recent announcements by OpenAI et al., the author is often asked whether researchers still have a future; he argues the deeper question is whether academia itself does—his verdict: unless things change, academia in its current form is doomed, and he won't shed a tear.
Core argument: academia borrowed metrics from running a burger joint (paper counts, citations) to measure "insights"; peer review was already near breaking, citation metrics gamed, prestige prioritized over long shots. With AI turning (badly written) papers into a commodity, reform is now unavoidable. He calls for building something better—moving away from citation-based metrics, evaluating faculty candidates on a small number of their best papers—and for individuals, insists there are still many interesting paths, no need to despair.
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