When I wrote about formalizing AI “peer” review I meant it as a tongue-in-cheek comment on the shoddy human peer review we are getting anyway. “Wittgenstein’s ruler: Unless you have confidence in the ruler’s reliability, if you use a ruler to measure a table you may also be using the table to measure the ruler. The less you trust a ruler’s reliability (in probability called the prior), the more information you are getting about the ruler and the less about the table.”, Nassim Taleb in Fooled by Randomness. Peer reviewers are the ruler, the articles are the table, and there is zero trust in the ruler’s reliability. It was also (1) a bet that the median AI review would soon be better than the median human review (and remember, the median journal article is not submitted to Nature or Cell but to a journal that’s teetering on being predatory), and (2) a prediction that the median journal is already getting “peer” reviews mostly or totally “written” by LLMs.
Things have progressed since January on both of these fronts. In a textbook example of the left hand not knowing what the right hand is doing, some journals are (unintentionally?) steering their reviewers towards using AI while at the same time prohibiting AI from being used. And some unscrupulous authors are using hidden prompts to steer LLM review their way (↬Andrew Gelman). On the other hand, I have just spent around 4 hours reviewing a paper without using any AI help whatsoever, and it was fun. More generally, despite occasionally writing about how useful LLMs can be, my use of ChatGPT has significantly decreased since I fawned over deep research.
Maybe I should be using it more. Doc Searls just wrote about LLM-driven “Education 3.0”, with some help from a sycophantic ChatGPT which framed eduction 1.0 as “deeply human, slow, and intimate” (think ancient Greeks, the Socratic method and the medieval Universities), 2.0 as “mechanized, fast, and impersonal” (from the industrial revolution until now), and 3.0 as “fast and personal”. Should I then just let my kids use LLMs whenever, unsupervised, like Neal Stephenson’s Primer (“an interactive book that will adapt as the user grows and learns”)? But then would I want my kids hanging out with a professional bullshitter? Helen Beetham has a completely contrarian stance — that AI is the opposite of education — and her argument is more salient, at least if we take AI to mean only LLMs. Hope lies eternal that somebody somewhere is developing actual artificial intelligence which could one day lead to such wonderful things as the “Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer”.
Note the emphasis on speed in the framing of Education 3.0. I am less concerned about LLM bullshit outside of education, in a professional setting, since part of becoming a professional is learning how to identify bullshitters in your area of expertise. But bullshit is an obstacle to learning: this is why during medical school in Serbia I opted for reading textbooks in English rather than inept translations to Serbian made by professors with an aptitude for bulshitting around ambiguity. This is, I suppose, the key reason why we need LLMs there in the first place for there is nothing stopping a motivated learner from browsing wikipedia, reading any number of freely available masterworks online, watching university lectures on YouTube, and interacting with professionals and fellow learners via email, social networks, Reddit and what not. But you need to be motivated either way: to be able to wait and learn without immediate feedback in a world without LLMs, or to be able to wade through hallucinations and bullshit that LLMs can generate immediately. Education faces a bootstrapping problem here, for how can you recognize LLM hallucinations in a field you yourself are just learning?
The through-line for all this is motivation. If you review papers in order to check a career development box, to get O1 visa/EB1 green card status, and/or get brownie points from a journal I suspect you would see it as a waste of time and take any possible shortcut. But if you review papers because of a sense of duty, for fun, or to satisfy a sadistic streak — perhaps all three! — why would you want to deprive yourself of the work? Education is the same: if you are learning for the sake of learning, why would you want to speed it up? Do you also listen to podcasts and watch YouTube lectures at 2x? Of course, many people are not into scientia gratia scientiae and are doing it to get somewhere or become something, in which case Education 2.0 should be right up their alley, along with the playback speed throttle.