LLMs now write lots of science. Good

> Peer review, for instance, will become even more important in a gen-ai world. It must be beefed up accordingly, perhaps by paying reviewers for the time they sacrifice to scrutinise papers.

So the cost savings in writing will be offset by additional costs of reading. Playing good defense is harder than playing offense.

The only strong argument here is that you can't tell anyway. Like effective doping in sport.

> And most worrying of all, writing can be an integral part of the research process, by helping researchers clarify and formulate their own ideas. An excessive reliance on llms could therefore make science poorer.

This. The mistake so many people seem to make is to think of writing merely as outputting text, when it's a lot more.

I predict LLMs will cause general competence levels to decrease, and an increase in the intellectual equivalent of three-fingered hands as more and more people lose the ability to notice the problem.