Do You Think I Am a Goldfish?

Academic writing has long been criticized for its formulaic nature. As I wrote about earlier, research papers are unfortunately written to please 3 specific expert reviewers who are overwhelmingly from academia. Given this twisted incentive structure (looking impressive for peer-review), the papers end up becoming formulaic, defensive, and often inpenetrable. 

Ironically, this very uniformity makes it trivially easy for LLMs to replicate academic writing. It is easy to spot LLM use in personal essays, but I dare you to do it successfully in academic writing. 

Aside: Ok, I baited myself with my own dare. In general, it is very hard to detect LLM usage at the paragraph level in a research paper. But LLM usage in research papers becomes obvious when you see the same definition repeated 3-4 times across consecutive pages.  The memoryless nature of LLMs causes them to recycle the same terms and phrases, and I find myself thinking "you already explained this to me four times, do you think I am a goldfish?" I have been reviewing a lot of papers recently, and this is the number one tell-tale sign. A careful read by the authors would clean this up easily, making LLM usage nearly undetectable. To be clear, I am talking about LLM assistance in polishing writing, not wholesale generation. A paper with no original ideas is a different beast entirely. They are vacuous and easy to spot. 

Anyway, as LLM use become ubiquitous, conference/journal reviewing is facing a big crisis. There are simply too many articles being submitted, as it is easy to generate text and rush half-baked ideas into the presses. I am, of course, unhappy about this. Writing that feels effortless because an LLM smooths every step deprives you of the strain that produces "actual understanding". That strain in writing is not a defect; it creates the very impetus for discovering what you actually think, rather than faking/imitating thought.

But here we are. We are at an inflection point in academic publishing.  I recently came across this post, which documents an experiment where an LLM replicated and extended a published empirical political science paper with near-human fidelity, at a fraction of the time and cost.

I have been predicting the collapse of the publishing system for a decade. The flood of LLM-aided research might finally break its back. And here is where I want to take you in this post. I want to imagine how academic writing may change in this new publishing regime. Call it a 5-10 year outlook, because at this day and age, who can predict anything beyond that.

I claim that costly signals of genuine intelligence will become the currency of survival in this new environment.

Costly signals work because they are expensive to fake, like a peacock’s tail or an elk’s antlers. And I claim academic writing will increasingly demand features that are expensive to fake. Therefore, a distinctive voice becomes more valuable precisely because it cannot be generated without genuine intellectual engagement. Personal narratives, peculiar perspectives, unexpected conceptual leaps, and field-specific cultural fluency are things that require deep immersion and creative investment that LLMs lack. These are the costly signals that will make a paper worth publishing. 

Literature reviews are cheap to automate, so they will shrink --as we are already seeing. But reviews with distinctive voice and genuine insight, ones that reflect on the author's own learning and thought process, will survive. Work that builds creative frameworks and surprising connections, which are expensive to produce, will flourish. When anyone can generate competent prose, only writing that screams "a specific human spent serious time thinking about this" will cut through.

So, LLMs may accidentally force academia toward what it always claimed to value: original thinking and clear communication. The costliest signal of all is having something genuinely new to say, and saying well. I am an optimist, as you can easily tell, if you are a long time reader of this blog.

“Simplicity and elegance are unpopular because they require hard work and discipline to achieve and education to be appreciated.”

-- Edsger W. Dijkstra