Call me an optimist, but I believe that the majority of scholars, despite being under enormous pressure to publish, would prefer to be more engaged than removed from the fundamental pursuits and texture of their discipline. They enjoy wrestling with sources, data, and theories, and are innately repelled by the superficiality of having AI write a complete paper. They want to lean into their work, not lean back in an automated armchair. As NYU astrophysicist David Hogg recently wrote, “Anyone working in astrophysics is someone who wants to do astrophysics, not someone who wants to learn the answers.”
I would say that anyone “working in astrophysics” at a university may well want to do astrophysics but also wants to get tenure and be promoted and maybe even get a job at a more prestigious institution — and if using chatbots promises an easier and more reliable path to those goals, then they’ll use chatbots to do the work for them. Intellectual curiosity even when real can be overwhelmed by greater urgencies.