Academics Need to Wake Up on AI, Part III
The article argues that much of academic research, particularly in the social sciences, has long been of low quality—what the author calls 'slop'—and that AI is merely exposing systemic flaws rather than creating them. It highlights that issues like poor methodology, lack of replication, and intellectual dishonesty predate AI and remain widespread in academia. The author contends that instead of fearing AI-generated content, academics should confront the existing failures in research standards and practices.
- ▪AI can already perform most social science research tasks better than the majority of professors globally, according to the author.
- ▪The 2026 International Studies Association conference displayed widespread low-quality presentations, including from tenured PhDs, with poor arguments and basic errors.
- ▪A recent Nature study found that only about half of statistically significant claims in social science papers replicated, with greatly reduced effect sizes upon replication.
- ▪The author defines 'slop' as low-quality research, which includes both indifferent scholarship and work produced without genuine inquiry, long before AI's emergence.
- ▪Academic problems such as hallucination and cheating in research have existed for decades, undermining claims that AI is uniquely responsible for declining research quality.
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Academics Need to Wake Up on AI, Part IIIMost of us do not contribute to human knowledge—AI just made it obviousAlexander KustovApr 15, 20261713843SharePlease like, share, comment, and subscribe. It helps grow the newsletter without a financial contribution on your part. Thank you for reading.In Part I, I argued that AI can already do social science research better than most professors. In Part II, I engaged with over a thousand responses, conceding where critics were right, while standing by my main claim: the academic status quo was already broken, and AI is just forcing the reckoning.1 In this Part III, written collaboratively with AI and my peers over the last month, I move from diagnosis to what academics can and can't actually do about it.The rather unlikely proximate cause of this…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Popularbydesign.
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