I Wasn't Allowed Prompting ChatGPT During My Chalk Talk: This Is Discrimination (2025)

https://inpreparation.substack.com/p/opinion-i-was-not-allowed-to-type

234 141 19 days ago

inpreparation.substack.com

topham2• 19 days ago

"prepared to do what I do every single day in my actual scientific practice: type a prompt and receive a coherent, well-structured response that I would then lightly edit and present as my own thinking."

So, plagiarism. Daily.

TheJCDenton• 19 days ago

This is satire

rolph4• 19 days ago

despite being satire this is no joke, this is what we are headed into if we dont stop the decline.

wrs• 19 days ago

Replace science with software development and this just reads like half of HN right now.

handoflixue7• 19 days ago

But when humans do it suddenly it's "standing on the shoulders of giants"

I don't get how you can possibly call it plagiarism if it produce a novel breakthrough - by definition, the existing knowledge base doesn't contain the new ideas generated in this process.

And we've proven it can handle complex, novel thinking when it solved a significant Erdos problem back in May: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-just-solved-an...

topham2• 19 days ago

I don't have a problem using AI.

I also acknowledge, when doing so, how I use it.

But, literally typing in a prompt and then massaging its output and then claiming ownership of its plan? Yeah, no.

It doesn't matter if the original article is supposed to be satire. I've been using AI to do some coding, I've been using it to help me plan a much larger project. It's a tool, and it's useful; but I am in control of the project, not letting the AI control me.

Meanwhile in my day job, I've had multiple coworkers pump shit into AI and regurgitate the answer without critical thought. They are letting it make decisions for them without validating it first even.

It's not really satire if we're already dealing with this attitude.

ShinyLeftPad8• 19 days ago

The difference is thinking for yourself

talon8635• 19 days ago

What’s going on with social queues today where so many people here are not immediately understanding this is clearly satire?

joeframbach• 19 days ago

I think this thread is a good indicator of llm bots vs human accounts on HN. The bots couldn't identify satire.

xenophonf• 18 days ago

Comedy is dead. I can't believe so many folks didn't clock this post.

(Also, the word is "cue", as in "signal". English sucks.)

handoflixue7• 19 days ago

Calling it "Discrimination" is obviously absurd but if the process produces useful results, one ought to seriously consider whether it might be worth switching.

I understand we have always conventionally transported goods by horse. Yes, this employee knows nothing about horses, and in fact is rather spooked by them, but we've checked! Their claim to be able to transport goods faster, without a horse, somehow seems to hold up.

Maybe, just maybe, we should take this whole "truck" concept seriously?

ekelsen• 19 days ago

I don't think the argument is necessarily against the use of the tools entirely. My interpretation is that it's against delegating to them all understanding.

Humans can only usefully steer LLMs if they have some understanding or context the LLMs do not.

danudey2• 19 days ago

Put another way: if all that you're doing is prompting the AI and giving me the result then I have no use for you. If you're not contributing insight, understanding, experience, or creativity then it's far cheaper for me to prompt the AI myself.

handoflixue7• 19 days ago

The person in the story can clearly usefully steer LLMs if they got that far. So either they have that understanding and context, or it's not actually as valuable as was previously thought.

wiseowise8• 19 days ago

Found Rachel. Thinking and doing things with this archaic thing called “brain” is not a horse, and using LLM is not a truck.

handoflixue7• 18 days ago

Do you do all your arithmetic by hand, or do you insist on using this archaic thing called "brain"?

Why are you even on the internet if you value this "brain" thing so much?

mrgoldenbrown• 19 days ago

This is satire.

flkiwi• 19 days ago

I hope so, but I work with people with exactly this attitude and approach.

wk_end• 19 days ago

That’s what makes it good satire.

Dependance2• 19 days ago

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 ?

Mistletoe• 19 days ago

Yes because Poe’s Law has never been more true than the current era.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law

swatcoder• 19 days ago

Among others, the voices on the internet include:

* some sincere people with very extreme takes,

* some trolls that masquerade as the above, to bully others over their credulousness and lack of guile, which is distinct from sarcasm,

* some trolls that insincerely speak anything that earns engagement,

* and more and more bots that mimic the above

So sadly, the answer to your question is generally yes.

mjr00• 19 days ago

Honest question : does it need to be said ?

At the current time I'm writing this, all other top-level comments are engaging with the article as if it were sincere. So, yes.

bigstrat2003• 19 days ago

Is humor that hard to grasp on the internet ?

Yes. Humor is very hard to grasp via text, especially sarcastic humor, because in person we use voice and body language to signal that something is meant as a joke.

CodesInChaos2• 19 days ago

I regularly get reddit comments downvoted by people who don't recognize it's obviously satire.

Sometimes somebody else comments "why is this getting downvoted, it's satire", and that stops or reverses the influx of downvotes.

H8crilA• 19 days ago

When I started reading it I thought for far too long that this person is actually stupi^H^H^H^H^H serious. So writing that it is satire is useful for people that do not read enough of the text, and just jump into the comments :) Also, this type of behavior has little to do with the neurodivergent spectrum, if anything it touches personality types, maybe maybe some trauma or addiction, unlikely to be caused by anything in the affective space (episodes would be too short) or psychosis space.

cyanydeez• 19 days ago

do LLMs dream of electric shhhheeep

EA-3167• 19 days ago

On this site? Yes it does, and even then we have people missing the point in the comments.

ofjcihen• 19 days ago

I think sometimes it is but only if the humor relies on a tone.

When it’s satire I think the main blocker of recognition is if you have an emotional reaction first.

As an example, if you are a diehard AI influencer or something you might miss the joke entirely because of the severity of your initial negative reaction.

Just my two cents. Glad I could contribute to completely beating the humor out of this post :)

PunchyHamster• 19 days ago

Humor died few years ago after series of increasingly more improbable events happening. "USA voted pedophile that bankrupted 3 casinos into second term" was stuff out of Onion decade ago, so some researcher walking into job interview with ChatGPT doesn't even move a needle on satire scale.

alterom4• 19 days ago

As someone on the spectrum, I can assure you that being on the spectrum is not an obstacle for understanding this kind of humor.

In fact, is the neurotypicals who struggle getting it because they rely on nonverbal cues (like a sarcastic tone of voice), which is missing in text, to detect humor.

Deadpan, dry humor is generally more amenable to the autistic mind, because it doesn't have what we consider noise.

If someone needs a laugh track to tell that something is a joke, then either it's a bad joke that wouldn't be made any better with a laugh track, or the problem exists between keyboard and chair.

vessenes• 19 days ago

It does, but unfortunately, this is in-crowd communication -- it's too high brow to hit anyone that needs to read it. But I enjoyed it, and I'm sure it was cathartic to write

cvoss• 19 days ago

Yes, it does need to be said. Many people will read this article and miss the satire, which is, in part, the intent of sophisticated satire. The point is that it is outlandish and foolish and ridiculous and yet still resembles some serious discourse that real people engage in. So much so that some onlookers can't tell the difference. That proves the satirist's thesis: the real world is full of ridiculous people making ridiculous arguments and they can't even see themselves or their arguments for what they are.

I know real life people who write essays with claims as outlandish as "software engineering is an ableist field" and are dead serious. But that assertion belongs just as well in a satire piece. It can be very hard to tell if you don't have prior context for the author.

JumpCrisscross3• 19 days ago

Honest question : does it need to be said ?

Yes. There are literally people who believe any thinking done without AI is Luddite and subpar.

These are not, in my experience, people who have done any great thinking in their lives. They do tend to tweet a lot.

ghusto2• 19 days ago

When it's this poorly executed, yes it needs to be said.

I was going back and forth on whether it was for far longer than I should have been.

krater23• 19 days ago

It's hardly too near on reality to not to say it.

pessimizer• 19 days ago

1) No it does not have to be said. Nobody is forcing anyone to explain anything.

2) I think that the best satire is fair, and should read to the targets as real commentary. When someone takes your satire seriously, it means that you have successfully commented on reality. Is that inverse Poe's Law?

Otherwise you're just putting words in your enemies' mouths that they would not ever say. I think people do this because they don't have the strength of their own convictions, and wouldn't be able to stand people not getting their joke (and worse, confusing them for extreme believers in something that they disdain.)

To them I would suggest that one doesn't try to make arguments through satire, one rather demonstrate arguments through satire. If you need to make your argument with satire, you actually don't have an argument. Satire without a solid underpinning argument is just propaganda.

antonvs• 19 days ago

As often happens with satire, you could read it as satirizing the idea that people should entirely rely on their own knowledge and memory, without AI assistance. The response to the article depends heavily upon one’s perspective on the subject.

LIMEVINCE• 19 days ago

Sadly I have to admit I read it and didn't know it was satire. The way they described using LLMs to to achieve research results sounded plausible enough to me. As an attorney, I also fear a race to the bottom where legal research becomes simply editing the work of AI. Also, the idea of being subject to a test with little relationship to professional practice reminds me of the bar exam; which requires intimate knowledge of almost all areas of the law despite the fact that practicing attorneys generally are only familiar with their specializations (eg, it would be unwise to retain a civil rights attorney to represent you for even a traffic violation); and requires all the knowledge to be memorized, even though it would be unthinkable (and most likely malpractice) for any attorney to practice relying solely on memory.

I also suspect that there are attorneys out there who are starting to use LLMs to generate legal work with a method similar to what the author described (generate prompt, revise minimally). Lawyers are taught to write a certain way which LLMs mirror flawlessly; the surest way to identify LLM generated legal writing is if it happens to hallucinate citations. I used to regularly find hallucinated citations, and occasionally strange reasoning, but both have largely vanished as the LLMS improve.

vector_vibe2• 19 days ago

exactly!

inigyou• 19 days ago

I got Poe's lawed

hemlock4593• 18 days ago

Is humor that hard to grasp on the internet ?

Problem is that the Internet is too big that there actually could be someone writing this as a serious blog post. For this one it was quite obvious at some point, but when only reading the first few paragraphs I am very certain that there could be someone out there meaning it serious (sadly).

watwut2• 18 days ago

Is humor that hard to grasp on the internet ?

It is just a joke was succesfully used as a goto excuse foe years. Usually when people actually have more of extreme stance, test waters and find that "not yet".

And since it was succesfull, many people dont want to play that game anymore or simply dont believe it anymore.

rtaylorgarlock2• 19 days ago

Your comment, or the post? ;) (I'll see myself out)

rtaylorgarlock2• 19 days ago

Hold on, rational humans downvoted this? Because you can't discern which is satirical and you have no sense of humor? I'll give you the same treatment I give cringe lords in online first-person shooters: take a shower.

andrewclunn• 19 days ago

I agree. ChatGPT told me it was most likely satire.

rebolek• 19 days ago

thank you, captain obvious

shikon7• 19 days ago

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.

alterom4• 19 days ago

That's what makes it good satire.

But if you honestly think that someone applying for a postdoc can't explain what their research is about, it's on you.

jdw642• 19 days ago

But honestly, I think it makes sense. In my experience with programming, when it comes to building and delivering software, it's not really about memorization. Honestly, search ability has been far more important. Wouldn't it be fair to think of AI as just another search ability?

What I'm curious about is this: in the end, experts are the ones who are best at distinguishing hallucinations. If you can just search with GPT and tell the difference, wouldn't that be enough? I can't imagine memorizing thousands or tens of thousands of lines.

I have ADHD, and when I get nervous, I tend to forget what I was going to say, so it's even more true for me.

bryanlarsen• 19 days ago

You can bring notes to a chalk talk.

danudey2• 19 days ago

Wouldn't it be fair to think of AI as just another search ability?

If you're asking it questions, yes. It's like search but with a simulation of understanding and information synthesis far faster than a human can perform it.

If you're having it write your code, no. It's like a junior developer who has no awareness of the bigger picture, of incompatibilities, of understanding that hasn't been contained and can't be derived from the codebase.

If you can just search with GPT and tell the difference, wouldn't that be enough?

The situation the satire is describing is an individual who is unable to tell the difference. The way the scenario is laid out, everything she's 'accomplished' has been to prompt ChatGPT and publish its answers with some degree of editing; it's clear that she, as an individual, is not an expert, does not understand the thing she is presenting, and does not know any of what she has purported to know. This is also a sadly common refrain these days.

I can't imagine memorizing thousands or tens of thousands of lines.

It's not about memorizing thousands of lines of text; it's about demonstrating to the panel that you have an understanding of the thing you're claiming to have an understanding of.

I work with a lot of software and infrastructure at work. I can tell you how it all (or most of it) works together and interacts. I could not reproduce the configurations of any of the software from memory, nor recite any of the code, but I have an understanding of the system, how it works, what it was designed for, and what choices were made and why.

The professor in this article does not have any of that understanding. It would be as if I had Claude deploy a cluster of X, Y, Z components, configure them, and get them online, and then put on my resume that I had done it. It was accomplished as result of me, but if I don't understand the system then there's no difference between me doing it and the CEO doing it, or my son, or someone from Taskrabbit.

So yeah, it's not about memorization, it's about understanding.

jdw642• 19 days ago

I think differently. The reason is our intuitive understanding of what it means to 'understand.' To be explicit, purpose and design always depend on scale. And software engineering operates on trust, at least at its foundation. Do you know every implementation detail of the libraries and frameworks you use? If you do, then I have nothing to say.

There are several things I don't understand.

How many people actually understand the internal workings of std::vector or React? Honestly, people use them just fine without knowing. And on the flip side, those who do know sometimes struggle with architecture design. Why? Because of 'cognitive resource limits.'

What I really don't understand is this: if everyone truly understood everything and could connect everything properly, then realistically, LLMs shouldn't have made the discoveries they have. The reason is simple—they're just encyclopedias at their core. But LLMs do make new discoveries, by applying knowledge from one domain to another.

Ultimately, it's a matter of what 'understanding' means and how deep we can go. I think we need to reconsider how we verify knowledge production systems in a society that produces at massive scale.

What I find hard to grasp about your notion of 'understanding' and 'knowing structural constraint failure modes' is this: can you actually list all possible failure conditions? The largest system I've worked on was a Chinese booking service with about 330,000 lines of code. There were so many failure conditions there—starting from external I/O and errors everywhere—that it was impossible to classify them all.

In the end, what matters is the abstraction boundary and failure modes that match the level you're claiming. And I think that's entirely valid. Do you have a counterargument?

I actually think a truly great developer is one who can limit the blast radius when a black box explodes. In that sense, I don't think the idea of knowing a black box empirically is wrong at all.

Not every developer can know everything about compilers, kernels, TLS, database engines, React, libc, or CPU memory models.

What I find difficult about this satire is this:

We're already standing on top of black boxes. We confidently use libraries in our projects, trusting the author's documentation. Is that really 'understanding'? I think it's memorization. We 'memorize' that something works and put it into our project. That's why I don't find it funny as a satire.

Right now, our knowledge transfer systems only operate within the clear cognitive limits of human understanding. But as things get deeper, something that goes beyond those limits will eventually emerge. At that point, can we really define that behavior as wrong?

No matter how detailed a map you have, it's still not the actual terrain. In the process of abstraction, we inevitably lose information. But how can we know exactly how much was lost? And even if we conceptually guess, I wonder if that will still be possible in future eras

root_axis3• 19 days ago

It's actually embarrassing that she thought all that prompting would have been acceptable during the talk.

A qualifed researcher would have had their agent perform the talk on their behalf rather than waste everyone's time.

iugtmkbdfil834• 19 days ago

<< << My own words? I haven’t used my own words since 2022. I’m not even sure I have my own words anymore.

I thought about you wrote and I think you are right. Even though I am partial to author's POV ( despite some obvious, glaring issues ), I can't help feeling of two minds about it all. I don't want to undermine existing ecosystem, but then.. the existing ecosystem in research may need some decent shake up.

tptacek• 19 days ago

It's a joke.

root_axis3• 19 days ago

So is my comment.

mlacks• 19 days ago

Quite a clever way to take a jab at the cross-coast rival. Well done

im3w1l2• 19 days ago

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?

rolph4• 19 days ago

>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.

im3w1l2• 19 days ago

I didn't mean it in the literal sense more like the AI is telling you do this do this do this do that and you relaying what happened and what you saw over text.

ahartmetz2• 19 days ago

A term has already been coined for AI driving human: the reverse centaur.

neilv• 19 days ago

One of the better-written ones I've seen. Am sending it around to some professors.

firefoxd• 19 days ago

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.

root_axis3• 19 days ago

The TAM for ProxyAI is even bigger than SpaceX's. Hopefully they IPO soon.

InsideOutSanta2• 19 days ago

The TAM is infinity, since agents need their own agents, which need their own agents, and so on.

wiseowise8• 19 days ago

stress free
fomo nomo
talk walk

This is golden.

ahartmetz2• 19 days ago

I also like "Terms | Privacy | Terms" at the bottom. It's... that kind of weird error.

low_tech_love3• 19 days ago

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.

tejohnso• 19 days ago

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.

ShinyLeftPad8• 18 days ago

"decision making that a chatbot is responsible for" is a pretty wild statement, though there's a few to choose from

low_tech_love3• 18 days ago

The problem is that we want, at the same time, to allow everyone to do it (by not enforcing any rules against it) AND laugh at a satire like this as if it was ridiculous. Both things cannot happen at the same time. It’ll be some time before we acknowledge that there is no research without AI, so we’ll keep pretending it doesn’t exist, but in the meantime, we will be doing all research with AI anyway. And by the time we arrive at a scenario like the article’s, it won’t be so ridiculous anymore, because we will be used to the even more ridiculous situation of pretending we’re not doing it.

semi-extrinsic• 17 days ago

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.

g42gregory• 19 days ago

I hope people understand that this is a satire. :-)

SteinsGoat• 19 days ago

I mean... this has to be satirical, right? Surely nobody in the field of academia is this limited in their ability....

InsideOutSanta2• 19 days ago

Sounds like you should feed the article into ChatGPT to find out whether it is satire.

Cpoll• 19 days ago

this has to be satirical, right?

Right.

Surely nobody in the field of academia is this limited in their ability....

Wrong.

whatsakandr• 19 days ago

Reminds me of a sub plot from Accelerando. Wasn't a huge fan of the book but it left an impression.

krallja• 19 days ago

It is, in other words, a ritual designed in 1974 and never updated.

The Chalk Talk was not invented after the IBM System/360. This entire article is clearly a joke.

ChrisMarshallNY5• 19 days ago

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.

Dylan168072• 19 days ago

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.

ChrisMarshallNY5• 19 days ago

Sure you do (but I’m pretty sure the original was a joke).

Calculators, computers, phones, etc., are standard parts of any design meeting, these days. I interviewed a number of folks, over the years, that brought laptops, and used them to demonstrate their work.

ShinyLeftPad8• 19 days ago

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

avaer• 19 days ago

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?

JumpCrisscross3• 19 days ago

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.

solresol• 19 days ago

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.

dag1002• 19 days ago

Wow, I can't wait to live in a world where nobody knows how anything works, some people are arbitrarily rich and some arbitrarily poor with no ability to change their standing in life, and, worst of all, people celebrate these developments, even if they may be in the poor cohort, as progress.

anthk• 19 days ago

This is how you get Idiocracy instead of geniouses.

devmor• 19 days ago

Ah yes, and I wasn’t allowed a google search during my whiteboard interview, which was totally also discrimination.

It is certainly not that case that the point of these exercises is to examine how you, as a person think and approach problems.

xelxebar• 19 days ago

This is about software developers.

vonunov2• 19 days ago

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

vonunov2• 19 days ago

Or are they? I don't know what to think anymore.

calzakk• 18 days ago

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.

vector_vibe2• 19 days ago

Loved it!

troglodytetrain• 19 days ago

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.

casey2• 19 days ago

Strawman takes a hit AND IT GOES DOWN!!

mcc1ane• 19 days ago

"The Evolution of Human Science"

LennyHenrysNuts• 19 days ago

She had me for the first 300 milliseconds. Very funny.

otekengineering• 18 days ago

academia will (hopefully) be an industry that benefits from, rather than degraded or obsoleted by, ai. the system should self-correct. scientists that use ai to give themselves more time to think will succeed and scientists that use ai to avoid thinking will fail. over the next few years processes and pedagogies should develop that help reliably guide researchers toward success.

there's a lot of tedium in academia. ai taking menial tasks off the plates of grad students and post docs allows them to spend more time collaborating with, instead of serving, the head of the lab. dissertation defense is already a strong mitigation against producing folks like that satirical Dr. Simmons, you can't defend a dissertation if you don't have the chops for a chalk talk.

watwut2• 18 days ago

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.

I Wasn't Allowed Prompting ChatGPT During My Chalk Talk: This Is Discrimination (2025)

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