My sense you are writing this as someone without lots of experience in writing and publishing scientific articles (correct me if I am wrong).
You’re correct in that I haven’t published any scientific articles—my publication experience is entirely in academic philosophy and my suggestions are based on my frustrations there. This may be a much more reasonable proposal for academic philosophy than other disciplines, since philosophy deals more with conceptually nebulous issues and has fewer objective standards.
linearly presenting ideas on paper—“writing”—is a form of extended creative cognitive creation that is difficult to replicate
I agree that writing is a useful exercise for thinking. I’m not so sure that it is difficult to replicate, or that the forms of writing for publication are the best ways of thinking. I think getting feedback on your work is also very important, and something that would be easier, faster, working with an avatar. So part of the process of training an avatar might be sketching an argument in a rough written form and then answering a lot of questions about it. That isn’t obviously a worse way to think through issues than writing linearly for publication.
My other comment is that most of the advantages can be gained by AI interpretations and re-imagining of a text e.g. you can ask ChatGPT to take a paper and explain it in more detail by expanding points, or make it simpler.
This could probably get a lot of the same advantages. Maybe the ideal is to have people write extremely long papers that LLMs condense for different readers. My thought was that at least as papers are currently written, some important details are generally left out. This means that arguments require some creative interpretation on the part of a serious reader.
The interesting question for me though which is what might be the optimal publication format to allow LLM’s to progress science
I’ve been thinking about these issues in part in connection with how to use LLMs to make progress in philosophy. This seems less clear cut than science, where there are at least processes for verifying which results are correct. You can train AIs to prove mathematical theorems. You might be able to train an AI to design physics experiments and interpret the data from them. Philosophy, in contrast, comes down more to formulating ideas and considerations that people find compelling; it is possible that LLMs could write pretty convincing articles with all manners of conclusions. It is harder to know how to pick out the ones that are correct.
One recent advancement in science writing (stemming from psychology through spreading) has been the pre-registered format and pre-registration.
Pre-registration often takes the form of a form—which effectively is a dialogue—where you have to answer a set of questions about your design. This forces a kind of thinking that otherwise might not happen before you run a study, which has positive outcomes in the clarity and openness of the thought processes that go into designing a study.
One consequence it can highlight that often we very unclear about how we might actually properly test a theory. In the standard paper format one can get away with this more—such as through HARKING or a review process where this is not found out.
This is relevant to philosophy but in psychology/science the format of running and reporting on an experiment is very standard.
I was thinking of a test of a good methods and results section—it would be of sufficient clarity and detail that a LLM could take your data and description and run your analysis. Of course, one should also provide your code anyway, but it is a good test even so.
So in the methods and results, then an avatar does not seem particularly helpful, unless it is effectively a more advanced version of a form.
For the introduction and discussion, a different type of thinking occurs. The trend over time has been for shorter introduction and discussion sections, even though page limits have ceased to be a limiting factor. There are a few reasons for this. But I don’t see this trend getting reversed.
Now, interesting you say you can use an avatar to get feedback on your work and so on. You don’t explicitly raise the fact that already now scientists will be using LLM’s to help them write papers. So instead of framing it as an avatar helping clarify the authors thinking, what inevitably will happen in many cases is that LLM’s will fill in thinking, and create novel thinking—in other words, a paper will have LLM’s a co-author. In terms of argument then, I think one could create a custom LLM with avatar interface designed to help authors write papers—which will do the things you suggest—give feedback, suggest ideas, along with fixing problems. And the best avatar interfaces will be personalised to the author e.g. discipline specific, and some knowledge of the author (such as learning all their past text to better predict).
And so yes, I think you are a right that will use avatars to help write text similar to what you suggest, and then readers will use avatars to help them read text. I suppose in the medium term I still see the journal article as a publication format that is going to be resistant to change. But LLM’s/avatars will be interfaces for production and consumption of them.
Thanks for your comments!
You’re correct in that I haven’t published any scientific articles—my publication experience is entirely in academic philosophy and my suggestions are based on my frustrations there. This may be a much more reasonable proposal for academic philosophy than other disciplines, since philosophy deals more with conceptually nebulous issues and has fewer objective standards.
I agree that writing is a useful exercise for thinking. I’m not so sure that it is difficult to replicate, or that the forms of writing for publication are the best ways of thinking. I think getting feedback on your work is also very important, and something that would be easier, faster, working with an avatar. So part of the process of training an avatar might be sketching an argument in a rough written form and then answering a lot of questions about it. That isn’t obviously a worse way to think through issues than writing linearly for publication.
This could probably get a lot of the same advantages. Maybe the ideal is to have people write extremely long papers that LLMs condense for different readers. My thought was that at least as papers are currently written, some important details are generally left out. This means that arguments require some creative interpretation on the part of a serious reader.
I’ve been thinking about these issues in part in connection with how to use LLMs to make progress in philosophy. This seems less clear cut than science, where there are at least processes for verifying which results are correct. You can train AIs to prove mathematical theorems. You might be able to train an AI to design physics experiments and interpret the data from them. Philosophy, in contrast, comes down more to formulating ideas and considerations that people find compelling; it is possible that LLMs could write pretty convincing articles with all manners of conclusions. It is harder to know how to pick out the ones that are correct.
One recent advancement in science writing (stemming from psychology through spreading) has been the pre-registered format and pre-registration.
Pre-registration often takes the form of a form—which effectively is a dialogue—where you have to answer a set of questions about your design. This forces a kind of thinking that otherwise might not happen before you run a study, which has positive outcomes in the clarity and openness of the thought processes that go into designing a study.
One consequence it can highlight that often we very unclear about how we might actually properly test a theory. In the standard paper format one can get away with this more—such as through HARKING or a review process where this is not found out.
This is relevant to philosophy but in psychology/science the format of running and reporting on an experiment is very standard.
I was thinking of a test of a good methods and results section—it would be of sufficient clarity and detail that a LLM could take your data and description and run your analysis. Of course, one should also provide your code anyway, but it is a good test even so.
So in the methods and results, then an avatar does not seem particularly helpful, unless it is effectively a more advanced version of a form.
For the introduction and discussion, a different type of thinking occurs. The trend over time has been for shorter introduction and discussion sections, even though page limits have ceased to be a limiting factor. There are a few reasons for this. But I don’t see this trend getting reversed.
Now, interesting you say you can use an avatar to get feedback on your work and so on. You don’t explicitly raise the fact that already now scientists will be using LLM’s to help them write papers. So instead of framing it as an avatar helping clarify the authors thinking, what inevitably will happen in many cases is that LLM’s will fill in thinking, and create novel thinking—in other words, a paper will have LLM’s a co-author. In terms of argument then, I think one could create a custom LLM with avatar interface designed to help authors write papers—which will do the things you suggest—give feedback, suggest ideas, along with fixing problems. And the best avatar interfaces will be personalised to the author e.g. discipline specific, and some knowledge of the author (such as learning all their past text to better predict).
And so yes, I think you are a right that will use avatars to help write text similar to what you suggest, and then readers will use avatars to help them read text. I suppose in the medium term I still see the journal article as a publication format that is going to be resistant to change. But LLM’s/avatars will be interfaces for production and consumption of them.