Economists warn: letting AI take over research yields mediocre grad-student papers
soumitrashukla9 · x · 2026-10-31
Economist Peter Boettke shared his decades-long habit of hunting for productivity tools, from WordPerfect to Kindle Scribe, sparking discussion on AI's role in academia.
farmerrf added: using AI as a research assistant is fine, but letting it take over the project is dangerous — it makes plausible-sounding suggestions at every stage, and accepting them without pushback yields a derivative project resembling a mediocre paper from a knowledgeable grad student. He caveats this holds as of October 2026 and may change within weeks given the pace of model progress.
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