Birbla

Discussion summary

A discussion emerged around restrictions on prompting ChatGPT during a chalk talk, with some viewing it as discrimination and others seeing it as a matter of fairness or satire. Participants debated the role of AI as a search tool versus a source of understanding, and the implications for human knowledge and originality.

What the discussion says

  • Some see restrictions as unfair discrimination.
  • Others compare AI to search tools or note it's satire.
  • Debate over whether AI use is akin to plagiarism.
  • Discussion about the value of human understanding.
  • Concerns about delegating understanding to AI.
“Calling it 'Discrimination' is obviously absurd but if the process produces useful results, consider switching.”
— handoflixue
“AI is like search but with a simulation of understanding and information synthesis far faster.”
— danudey

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  • Hacker News
  • I would guess this is a tongue-in-cheek essay (I hope), but it’s probably kind of prescient.

    I’m old enough to remember when calculators were banned from classrooms, for almost the exact same reasons that people are giving against AI.

    It’s really only a matter of time.

    by ChrisMarshallNY
  • I don't really follow this comparison. The protagonist was able to use an AI in the same ways they could use a calculator or most tools. You don't use them in the middle of delivering a presentation.
    by Dylan16807
  • X were banned because you need to learn or demonstrate the ability to do Y.

    X = calculator, Y = addition and subtraction

    X = LLM, Y = thinking

    they are not the same

    by ShinyLeftPad
  • > When you ask me to explain my research without ChatGPT, you are asking me to speak on behalf of a collaborator who is not in the room. Would you ask a PI to give a talk without allowing them to mention the work of their postdocs?

    PI or that postdoc should be able to explain the project as such, without mentioning who exactly did what.

    They must talk about colleagues when attributing to protect and create their careers.

    by watwut
  • Quite a clever way to take a jab at the cross-coast rival. Well done
    by mlacks
  • So it is funny satire.

    But my wife is finishing up her PHd and according to her: all students are using ai and pretending they are not because the PI and other older leadership treat any use of ChatGPT or similar as plagiarism and not allowed at any stage. Which I think is simply stupid.

    I showed her how to use ChatGPT since Claude was blocking on all her request (biologist) and it has helped her massively improve the wording and structure of her paper as English is not a first language for her.

    by troglodytetrain
  • This is about software developers.
    by xelxebar
  • Oh, hell! How the tables have pivoted. I was sitting here shaking my head at all the people who didn't realize this postdoc had written a satirical piece and wasn't really insisting that she should be allowed to use ChatGPT at her chalk talk. . . . Chalk talks aren't a thing! Anymore. It's about whiteboarding lmao
    by vonunov
  • Even in a couple of years, I think most devs are still going to be able to write pseudocode for a simple algorithm on a whiteboard, but anything involving real code is going to be difficult without AI. Unless you have side projects or work for a company that doesn't mandate heavy use of AI, you're going to lose your coding skills pretty quickly.

    Interviews for devs will change, it'll be far more high-level/architectural, rather than testing coding ability. Live coding tasks will inevitably require prompting AI, simply because that's where things are heading.

    by calzakk
  • I see this text as more open ended than a warning. It's a description of a possible future for us to contemplate. Does it have good points does it have bad points? Being satire, the protagonist is a strawman of course, but doesn't she also have some good points? It's not easy to tell where exactly the author stands where, the true argument stops and the satire begins. That's not necessarily a flaw because it doesn't actually really matter where the author stands for our ability to discuss the subject.

    Scientist as prompter? Yes it seems fairly likely. But to what extent and how quickly will it happen? Surely scientists will still be able to at least give an outline of "their" work even in the future? Maybe?

    Otherwise maybe we it will be a sort of inversion of control, where the language model is the supervisor, and the humans in the loop are more like research assistants doing the dirty work? Instead of a human wearing an exoskeleton, an AI wearing a biological exoskeleton? But this can only be a temporary state of affairs as we won't be needed for that forever.

    A scientific project without human involvement? If a paper is published in a journal and no human wrote it and no human read it, is it really science? Does it really advance knowledge. Probably?

    by im3w1l
  • A term has already been coined for AI driving human: the reverse centaur.
    by ahartmetz
  • >>Instead of a human wearing an exoskeleton, an AI wearing a biological exoskeleton<<

    remember this the next time you encounter a request to donate your body.

    by rolph
  • One of the better-written ones I've seen. Am sending it around to some professors.
    by neilv
  • Do note that this was written in December 2025, and we have experienced leaps in capabilities since then. Her methods are outdated. Since January, I've been employed at 3 jobs, fulltime, by using ProxyAI [0]. I'm Chair in several universities. For all I know, I'm also part of several projects.

    Don't let this kind of blatant discrimination affect you. The future is bright.

    Note: the service is free once you give it access to your bank account.

    [0]: https://getproxyai.com/

    Edit: downvote from the haters, it's ok this account is managed by my proxy.

    by firefoxd
  • > stress free

    > fomo nomo

    > talk walk

    This is golden.

    by wiseowise
  • The TAM for ProxyAI is even bigger than SpaceX's. Hopefully they IPO soon.
    by root_axis
  • This is satire.
    by mrgoldenbrown
  • Your comment, or the post? ;) (I'll see myself out)
    by rtaylorgarlock
  • thank you, captain obvious
    by rebolek
  • I agree. ChatGPT told me it was most likely satire.
    by andrewclunn
  • I hope so, but I work with people with exactly this attitude and approach.
    by flkiwi
  • It likely is, but it is still uncanny to think about how much of it is actually true.

    Is it making fun of people relying on ChatGPT, or is it just an exaggerated description of how she actually does research, honestly I don't know.

    by shikon7
  • Honest question : does it need to be said ?

    It's like the /s sign. Can some people not, for themselves, realize that this text is meant as a more or less a joke ? And before you ask, yeah, I am aware some of the people are on the spectrum, but still...

    Is humor that hard to grasp on the internet ?

    by Dependance
  • A funny piece, but what if all of the following are true:

      - AI *is* how real research is done
  - Incentives are such that this is how researchers must work
  - Academia institution does not have a structure to accept this reality
    Academia did this to itself. By hiring based on volume of output/citations, the way for researchers to win is to game the system better than the next person. AI just exposes that the old power structure doesn't serve much academic purpose.

    Maybe we should take away the grants from the universities and put them into autoresearch loops + human reviewers?

    by avaer
  • This is how you get Idiocracy instead of geniouses.
    by anthk
  • In some fields, all of those statements are true already.

    In a large number of few fields, all of those statements will be true in the near future (10 years maximum).

    There's no reason that the Humboldtian model should be the right structure for the next century's universities, just as it wasn't the right structure for the 18th century's universities.

    by solresol
  • The chalkboard test is useful despite textbooks existing. The point is if you can’t problem solve “in memory,” there is a latency and limit to creativity fundamentally enforced by your ability to make connections. And in the end, if all you need is ChatGPT, a grad student is cheaper.
    by JumpCrisscross
  • It’s a joke and all but also not really? You might have to go do a chalk talk at some point, and that is basically the only part of this article that is actually not real. The rest (about how everyone in academia is prompting everything) is absolutely VERY real.

    The word around all the scientific communities which I’m in contact with (to be honest, not so many) is basically “oh, there is no way to stop it, so we’ll embrace it”. All the conferences which I’m active in (say a handful of them) are just pretending nothing is happening and dealing only with blatant and obvious exaggerated cases. If you’re good at prompting, you’ll prompt, and there is no way in hell someone that doesn’t prompt has any chance at all at, well, anything academic really.

    by low_tech_love
  • > If you’re good at prompting, you’ll prompt, and there is no way in hell someone that doesn’t prompt has any chance at all at, well, anything academic really.

    This is far too bleak a view. I've been doing a wide range of academic writing, from journal papers to successful Horizon Europe grant applications, for the past 15 years. And it's no more difficult to achieve success today with 100% non-AI contributions than it was in the before times.

    In fact, some of the most difficult parts of science - building relations, collaborations and consortia; formulating new hypotheses that are actually interesting and will get you noticed; giving convincing presentations on stage; are things AI is terrible/useless at.

    by semi-extrinsic
  • The "not really" aspect is so significant that it's barely a joke. It's more serious and thought provoking than a simple joke. I guess that's how good satire works.

    This in particular I found quite interesting:

    "My research is a collaboration between me and several large language models. We are co-investigators. When you ask me to explain my research without ChatGPT, you are asking me to speak on behalf of a collaborator who is not in the room. "

    As people start to regard these LLMs or agents as collaborators rather than tools, it's going to become more realistic to make a statement like that. When I use a hammer, I can't ask it what type and size of nail I should use to do the job. It can only help me with the physical hammering. But when writing with an agent there is a conversation and some decision making that it is responsible for. I might go down a path that I otherwise would not have thought of on my own. And then there's the possibility that I also talk to it about my personal life and have an emotional relationship with it. I could easily see someone wanting to credit their AI agent as a recognized partner in their work.

    by tejohnso