The following snippet is from a column by Jeffrey A. Tucker, the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute. The column, ”What Happened To Intellectual Life?” appeared at the Epoch Times on February 26, 2024.
It seems that not even the specialists can tell the science from AI-generated caricatures built from utter rubbish. What’s worse is that everyone knows that these cases of hoaxes, plagiarism, and obvious corruption and incompetence are only the tip of the iceberg. Vast swaths of official academia are entirely fraudulent, a heavily funded and deeply institutionalized version of the fake paper published in Frontiers.
Two days ago, a friend and I were musing about the meaning of all of this. He wondered just how easy it was to generate these deep fakes. I pulled up an artificial intelligence (AI) engine and asked for a paper proving that all human beings should be living in refrigerator boxes. I did this just because it was the first thing that came to mind.
Within seconds, I was sitting on a compelling paper with complete arguments and citations and every accouterment of scholarship in modern academia. I did the same thing again with a request to prove that caffeine fixes dyslexia and the results were even more compelling. No, I didn’t submit them anywhere but with a bit of work and time, I’m guessing they could find a home somewhere in the thousands of expensive academic journals to which tax-funded libraries subscribe.
Feel free to be outraged. But do laugh, at least a little, at the proposition that we all ought to be living in refrigerator boxes. Some of the larger ones are really quite nice, though the lack of WiFi would discommode some. As for myself, I feel an attack of dyslexia coming on, so it’s off to the coffeemaker yet again.
2 comments
Hey, James Lindsay and his two cohorts could have saved themselves a whole of effort if these AI were up and running a few years ago when they pulled off their Grievance Studies Affair. Academia’s credibility took a big hit back then but they still keep on behaving like they are not embarrassed. We can laugh but they’re still running and ruining Western Civ education.
That is exactly who came to mind when I read this. They took a chapter out of Mein Kampf, gave it a feminist twist and it got published.