The path forward for ChatGPT in academia

We recently had an argument in one of our lab meetings (in the VKPrasad Labs, which I’m a member of) over whether ChatGPT has any use in academia. Vinay Prasad hated applications such as ChatGPT and thinks it adds pretty much no value to academia, while Timothée Olivier who is also a member of the Lab and a physician in Switzerland (like myself) argued that it will have a place in academia, even though it's not yet clear what that place might be.

I found myself somewhere on the middle ground. Timothée's point was that ChatGPT will be used to replace physicians/academics in the process of filling out of tedious forms and routine paper work that doesn't require much thought. Vinay argued that ChatGPT could spit out a thousand papers a year but could never produce an original idea. If you rely on it to run a research lab you will inevitably run out of ideas within a

week and it adds no value to your team. I personally think that ChatGPT is good at making up phrasings and standard formulations for essays and academic

writings, but could never reliably replace a thoughtful academic. I think most people will agree with this.

Therefor I argued that one thing we could use applications such as ChatGPT for, is to let it phrase out your papers and essays if you provide it with your original thoughts. Vinay didn't think much of this idea. Can you really be a good thinker if you aren't a good writer? was his counterargument. While I don't disagree with that point, we have to concede to the fact not everyone can be as gifted as a thinker and writer as Vinay Prasad. I think many people that struggle phrasing and structuring their essays and academic writing (especially non-native English-speakers) are tempted to agree with me.

But on further thought there is a danger in this line of argument. You could let applications such as ChatGPT phrase out all your ideas. And I think this will feel good for a while and make you more efficient. However in the long run I don’t think it will help you improve your writing. I remember the time I started using a spell-check and how much that improved my life. However, nowadays I find myself unable to spell the easiest words without a spell check. Likewise I think applications like ChatGPT, will diminish your own skills as a writer, since they won’t allow you to take part in the active struggle to work through your thoughts. After a while you will tend to agree with whatever the bot spits out even if that might not fully capture your initial thought. I think Vinay is right in arguing that writing is thinking. If you let your writing be done by anyone or anything else, your thinking will also suffer under it.

But then again I think he is too optimistic. If you take a look at academia as it is now, with 90% (please don't pin me down on that number, I just made it up on the top

of my head) of the writing done not by the first author of a paper and teeming with medical writers, replacing medical writers with an AI application is only the next

logical step. Change is inevitable and I think the future will lead us in this direction. The question is only if that is a future, which is better or worse from now. I, for my part, think it will be pretty much the same while exacerbating an already existing trend towards decrease in the writing skills

of the average academic.

Disclosure:

ChatGPT (or no similar application) was used in the generation of this essay