My colleague Lisa DV posted a link to “In Memoriam: The Academic Journal” on an internal AI chat —
In this piece we reflect on the life and influence of AJ, the academic journal, charting their history and contributions to science, discussing how their influence changed society and how, in death, they will be mourned for what they once stood for but for which, in the end, they had moved so far from that they will less missed than they might have been.
— & it fomented some conversation. Some conversation centered on the utility or lack thereof of AI to research, & how it could be useful, & how even if it’s useful in some use cases, it still poses potentially insuperable problems to the existing scholarly publishing ecosystem.
I summed up my take thusly:
The Academic Journals RIP piece is cute. But the bigger problem is not academic journals (which as I’ve said if they die, I won’t be mourning) but the research enterprise. So long as academics’ life outcomes — their salary & financial well-being & their healthcare & so forth — are all dependent on research outputs, there will be incentives among academics to cheat. Indeed, just as there are incentives among students to cheat for grades, credit, & the eventual certification that a degree offers, allowing access to higher-level salaries and so forth. There’s been lots of pre-AI cheating putting strain on the system for a while — from data fudging (hence the replicability crisis) to citation rings to splitting papers into “minimum publishable units”. And plenty of exploitation of these motives by publishers. AI might super-charge these problems, but if so, it’s just going to make more apparent the existing dysfunction.
Perhaps it’s worth spelling out that this is all a predictable consequence of the capture of scholarly research by capitalist business interests, from publishers to tech transfer office activities to …. on and on.
If we want intellectual advancement, we need to disentangle it from “the research enterprise” anyhow. The current incentives are very messed up.
I played a bit of a dirty trick (unintentionally!) on my colleagues by posting that (to which they reacted) & then editing to add this:
Relatedly — I’ve been playing w/ Claude code over the past couple of weeks, and it’s been helpful in both (a) advancing a project, and (b) helping me master some new skills. A friend blogged about his experiences w/ people like me (maybe me included) here: https://www.oblomovka.com/wp/2026/01/07/ai-psychosis-ai-apotheosis/
and I thought he had some good points:
“I don’t think you get power by asking for it, and only rarely get it by demanding it. In the world of technological empowerment, you get it by stealing it.”
Posting here in furtherance of my goal to reboot my brain with daily (or at least more frequent) creativity practice….
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