I think everyone is struggling to figure out how to reorganize academia (and everything, really) in the brave new world of AI.
My guess is ai-generated contributions will in general not be seen as very valuable for promotion, unless the prompting was particularly inventive, or the human added a crucial contribution in the loop.
But if that happens, then prompters will be tempted to hide the fact that they used AI.... so there will be an arms race between the vibers and ai-detection tools.
As for publication, the whole system is broken to begin with. There's no reason that journals should be capacity limited the way they used to be, when the amount of paper and print literally constrained how much could be published. AI-generated proofs should still be published, since they add to our knowledge-base, but whether they can get published in journals depends I guess on what people view the purpose of journal publication to be. Right now, it feels a lot like journal publication is a prestige-signal / status-good more than anything related to actual knowledge dissemination.
Imagine if you're a unknown, up and coming mathematician and you come up with an actually significant mathematical proof / finding and everyone assumes you used AI? Things are going to be weird...
I think everyone is struggling to figure out how to reorganize academia (and everything, really) in the brave new world of AI.
My guess is ai-generated contributions will in general not be seen as very valuable for promotion, unless the prompting was particularly inventive, or the human added a crucial contribution in the loop.
But if that happens, then prompters will be tempted to hide the fact that they used AI.... so there will be an arms race between the vibers and ai-detection tools.
As for publication, the whole system is broken to begin with. There's no reason that journals should be capacity limited the way they used to be, when the amount of paper and print literally constrained how much could be published. AI-generated proofs should still be published, since they add to our knowledge-base, but whether they can get published in journals depends I guess on what people view the purpose of journal publication to be. Right now, it feels a lot like journal publication is a prestige-signal / status-good more than anything related to actual knowledge dissemination.