Assuming the anecdote at the beginning wasn't also dreamed up by an LLM, there is something profoundly depressing about a working academic using AI to generate an article to counterpoint his own students fears about that same AI taking their jobs.
The publication model in academia is predatory and elitist, but have you considered that your paper just wasn't that good?
Almost every scientific paper published in every field is "world first" research, and the job of tier 1 journals is to decide what deserves to be signal boosted, and what doesn't.
This response to rejection to me confirms the fears implicit in the article linked above. Not only is private AI research not transparent and not documenting its work, it also has a deep rooted culture issue.
Since this guy really loves Michael Levin, thought I'd share a little anecdote.
I had the unhappy privilege of attending one of his academic talks during his xenobots era, where he claimed his artificial living systems could seek and sense food based on local gradient. He was asked during the talk whether he'd controlled for mechanical effects, after all maybe the xenobot was just preferentially diffusing towards the food rather than sensing it. Levin responded by calling the guy an idiot, and seemed to suggest that there was no difference between these explanations.
Apparently not.
reply