I always thought that was the point of the novel. At the end, they get rescued, and the ship captain sees what they have done. He is astounded that there could be such barbarism among British children.

It’s not about human nature, it’s about the assumptions of what civilization means.

I recently rejected an AI written paper, and left a nasty note to the authors about how they were wasting my time.

Because research requires precision. To do background reading, I have to throw out everything that isn’t relevant to my particular study. My study is new, so the main driver is my concept of what I want to do. The AI is good at finding things with the same keywords, but not at excluding what isn’t relevant to my thought process.

I use Google Scholar for searching for literature. I put in some keywords, then scan through the titles. Most of them are not relevant, but I can click through hundreds of titles in a few minutes to focus my attention where it matters, then use the references/citations of those papers to build out what I need to focus on.

AI will give me a massive block of text that includes 5-6 references, with long explanations of what each is about. It is an attempt to do the same thing, but I have to throw out most or all of them, re-prompt, and then get another similar answer. Sometimes it throws things out that aren’t peer reviewed.

It also loses the happenstance of stumbling on something irrelevant but important. That’s why I still look at the monthly journal publication lists to see what is happening.

Writing is similar. I need to condense several peer reviewed papers to the core ideas that are relevant to what I am saying, which might mean 1-2 sentences. AI will always give paragraphs that are not really getting to what I want, so I still have to do the work myself anyway. It is just adding steps to do the same process.

I use AI in my work. I have an exclusive use case: when I get admin documents that I have to fill in, and that nobody will ever read, I have AI fill them in for me.

But any time I do anything else, I use my brain. I tried getting LLMs to write research articles for me, and I found that there was no part of the process that they could actually help with. Getting the wall of text or bad list of references meant that I had just doubled my job.

It seems like there should be a good application for these systems, but I don’t know what it is.