Here are some of the essay topics I had them read aloud:
[...]
I expected them to laugh, but they sat in silence. When they did finally speak, I am happy to say that it bothered them. They didn’t like hearing how their AI-generated submissions, in which they’d clearly felt some personal stake, amounted to a big bowl of bland, flavorless word salad.
But that's what it has been trained on - almost all academic writing is bland flavorless word salad, and this is extremely noticeable in title fads. I have a nearly decade-long game running with my friend where me make up absolutely bullshit concepts that could nevertheless be plausibly published in a journal, and the process has been going on long before that.
'Verbing the noun: towards a genericization theory of expressivity in high-entropy counter-heterogeneity' describes an ongoing problem in academic writing where novelty is deprioritized in favor of acceptability by an evermore tightly circumscribed set of peer professionals whose socioeconomic interests favor the establishment of intellectual stasis that maximally conserves positionality in a quais-Simmelian network space parameterized by income, tenure proximity, and citation count.
Or put more clearly, the more academics write to impress each other instead of to reach the public, the more generic their titles and language will be. Being able to parse and regurgitate wordy titles and abstracts constitutes table stakes in academia, so the incentives tilt toward burying the lede any original proposals as deeply as possible so as the minimize the career-damaging possibility of rejection on technical/syntactical grounds.
[...] I expected them to laugh, but they sat in silence. When they did finally speak, I am happy to say that it bothered them. They didn’t like hearing how their AI-generated submissions, in which they’d clearly felt some personal stake, amounted to a big bowl of bland, flavorless word salad.
But that's what it has been trained on - almost all academic writing is bland flavorless word salad, and this is extremely noticeable in title fads. I have a nearly decade-long game running with my friend where me make up absolutely bullshit concepts that could nevertheless be plausibly published in a journal, and the process has been going on long before that.
'Verbing the noun: towards a genericization theory of expressivity in high-entropy counter-heterogeneity' describes an ongoing problem in academic writing where novelty is deprioritized in favor of acceptability by an evermore tightly circumscribed set of peer professionals whose socioeconomic interests favor the establishment of intellectual stasis that maximally conserves positionality in a quais-Simmelian network space parameterized by income, tenure proximity, and citation count.
Or put more clearly, the more academics write to impress each other instead of to reach the public, the more generic their titles and language will be. Being able to parse and regurgitate wordy titles and abstracts constitutes table stakes in academia, so the incentives tilt toward burying the lede any original proposals as deeply as possible so as the minimize the career-damaging possibility of rejection on technical/syntactical grounds.