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I Wasn't Allowed Prompting ChatGPT During My Chalk Talk: This Is Discrimination (2025)
- vector_vibe 4mo agoLoved it!
- topham 4mo ago"prepared to do what I do every single day in my actual scientific practice: type a prompt and receive a coherent, well-structured response that I would then lightly edit and present as my own thinking." So, plagiarism. Daily.
- TheJCDenton 4mo agoThis is satire
- rolph 4mo agodespite being satire this is no joke, this is what we are headed into if we dont stop the decline.
- bena 4mo agoI think that's what the satire is trying to warn against.
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- wrs 4mo agoReplace science with software development and this just reads like half of HN right now.
- georgemcbay 4mo agoMy thought process in engaging with the post was: Reading the title: I hope this is a joke. First paragraph in: Oh, good, it is a joke. 75% through: Ok, this is a great bit of satire, but this reads uncomfortably like many of the non-joke discussions I've seen around software development over the past year.
- redsocksfan45 4mo ago[dead]
- handoflixue 4mo agoBut when humans do it suddenly it's "standing on the shoulders of giants" I don't get how you can possibly call it plagiarism if it produce a novel breakthrough - by definition, the existing knowledge base doesn't contain the new ideas generated in this process. And we've proven it can handle complex, novel thinking when it solved a significant Erdos problem back in May: https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-just-solved-an-80-year-old-erdos-problem-and-mathematicians-are-amazed/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/ai-just-solved-an...
- ShinyLeftPad 4mo agoThe difference is thinking for yourself
- handoflixue 4mo agoSorry, what about solving an open mathematics problem is not "thinking for yourself"? What exactly WOULD constitute "thinking for yourself", or is this just a magic soul thing?
- ShinyLeftPad 4mo agoyou read some books and think hard = not plagiarism you press a button and a machine creates a derivative work from some books = plagiarism (mostly by people who made the machine and charge you for it, maybe arguably you but that's a different question)
- topham 4mo agoI don't have a problem using AI. I also acknowledge, when doing so, how I use it. But, literally typing in a prompt and then massaging its output and then claiming ownership of its plan? Yeah, no. It doesn't matter if the original article is supposed to be satire. I've been using AI to do some coding, I've been using it to help me plan a much larger project. It's a tool, and it's useful; but I am in control of the project, not letting the AI control me. Meanwhile in my day job, I've had multiple coworkers pump shit into AI and regurgitate the answer without critical thought. They are letting it make decisions for them without validating it first even. It's not really satire if we're already dealing with this attitude.
- talon8635 4mo agoWhat’s going on with social queues today where so many people here are not immediately understanding this is clearly satire?
- joeframbach 4mo agoI think this thread is a good indicator of llm bots vs human accounts on HN. The bots couldn't identify satire.
- xenophonf 4mo agoComedy is dead. I can't believe so many folks didn't clock this post. (Also, the word is "cue", as in "signal". English sucks.)
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- handoflixue 4mo agoCalling it "Discrimination" is obviously absurd but if the process produces useful results, one ought to seriously consider whether it might be worth switching. I understand we have always conventionally transported goods by horse. Yes, this employee knows nothing about horses, and in fact is rather spooked by them, but we've checked! Their claim to be able to transport goods faster, without a horse, somehow seems to hold up. Maybe, just maybe, we should take this whole "truck" concept seriously?
- ekelsen 4mo agoI don't think the argument is necessarily against the use of the tools entirely. My interpretation is that it's against delegating to them all understanding. Humans can only usefully steer LLMs if they have some understanding or context the LLMs do not.
- danudey 4mo agoPut another way: if all that you're doing is prompting the AI and giving me the result then I have no use for you. If you're not contributing insight, understanding, experience, or creativity then it's far cheaper for me to prompt the AI myself.
- handoflixue 4mo agoThe person in the story can clearly usefully steer LLMs if they got that far. So either they have that understanding and context, or it's not actually as valuable as was previously thought.
- simonh 4mo agoShe says she can usefully steer LLMs, but how would she know? What knowledge of the research topic, methods and their applicability would she use to judge that, if all she’s doing is writing a prompt asking ChatGPT to write a summary of her research topic, methods and their applicability? Supposing using LLMs as research tools is fine, the chalk talk is still necessary to test that the researcher has the fundamental skills and knowledge necessary to discriminate usefully between alternative responses, and refine prompts and such. You can’t just get a response from an LLM and then refine it for your specific needs by saying “now refine that reply for my specific needs”. You need to know and understand what those are, and why.
- antibull 4mo ago[dead]
- mrgoldenbrown 4mo agoThis is satire.
- flkiwi 4mo agoI hope so, but I work with people with exactly this attitude and approach.
- wk_end 4mo agoThat’s what makes it good satire.
- Dependance 4mo agoHonest question : does it need to be said ? It's like the /s sign. Can some people not, for themselves, realize that this text is meant as a more or less a joke ? And before you ask, yeah, I am aware some of the people are on the spectrum, but still... Is humor that hard to grasp on the internet ?
- EA-3167 4mo agoOn this site? Yes it does, and even then we have people missing the point in the comments.
- Mistletoe 4mo agoYes because Poe’s Law has never been more true than the current era. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poe%27s_law
- Dependance 4mo agoHow wow, it even has a name and a wikipedia article... Guess that makes it official then. We are all automatons pretending to be flesh :-)
- satvikpendem 4mo ago
- jdw64 4mo agoBut honestly, I think it makes sense. In my experience with programming, when it comes to building and delivering software, it's not really about memorization. Honestly, search ability has been far more important. Wouldn't it be fair to think of AI as just another search ability? What I'm curious about is this: in the end, experts are the ones who are best at distinguishing hallucinations. If you can just search with GPT and tell the difference, wouldn't that be enough? I can't imagine memorizing thousands or tens of thousands of lines. I have ADHD, and when I get nervous, I tend to forget what I was going to say, so it's even more true for me.
- bryanlarsen 4mo agoYou can bring notes to a chalk talk.
- danudey 4mo ago> Wouldn't it be fair to think of AI as just another search ability? If you're asking it questions, yes. It's like search but with a simulation of understanding and information synthesis far faster than a human can perform it. If you're having it write your code, no. It's like a junior developer who has no awareness of the bigger picture, of incompatibilities, of understanding that hasn't been contained and can't be derived from the codebase. > If you can just search with GPT and tell the difference, wouldn't that be enough? The situation the satire is describing is an individual who is unable to tell the difference. The way the scenario is laid out, everything she's 'accomplished' has been to prompt ChatGPT and publish its answers with some degree of editing; it's clear that she, as an individual, is not an expert, does not understand the thing she is presenting, and does not know any of what she has purported to know. This is also a sadly common refrain these days. > I can't imagine memorizing thousands or tens of thousands of lines. It's not about memorizing thousands of lines of text; it's about demonstrating to the panel that you have an understanding of the thing you're claiming to have an understanding of. I work with a lot of software and infrastructure at work. I can tell you how it all (or most of it) works together and interacts. I could not reproduce the configurations of any of the software from memory, nor recite any of the code, but I have an understanding of the system, how it works, what it was designed for, and what choices were made and why. The professor in this article does not have any of that understanding. It would be as if I had Claude deploy a cluster of X, Y, Z components, configure them, and get them online, and then put on my resume that I had done it. It was accomplished as result of me, but if I don't understand the system then there's no difference between me doing it and the CEO doing it, or my son, or someone from Taskrabbit. So yeah, it's not about memorization, it's about understanding.
- root_axis 4mo agoIt's actually embarrassing that she thought all that prompting would have been acceptable during the talk. A qualifed researcher would have had their agent perform the talk on their behalf rather than waste everyone's time.
- iugtmkbdfil834 4mo ago<< << My own words? I haven’t used my own words since 2022. I’m not even sure I have my own words anymore. I thought about you wrote and I think you are right. Even though I am partial to author's POV ( despite some obvious, glaring issues ), I can't help feeling of two minds about it all. I don't want to undermine existing ecosystem, but then.. the existing ecosystem in research may need some decent shake up.
- tptacek 4mo agoIt's a joke.
- root_axis 4mo agoSo is my comment.
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- S1ned01 4mo ago[flagged]
- mlacks 4mo agoQuite a clever way to take a jab at the cross-coast rival. Well done
- im3w1l 4mo agoI see this text as more open ended than a warning. It's a description of a possible future for us to contemplate. Does it have good points does it have bad points? Being satire, the protagonist is a strawman of course, but doesn't she also have some good points? It's not easy to tell where exactly the author stands where, the true argument stops and the satire begins. That's not necessarily a flaw because it doesn't actually really matter where the author stands for our ability to discuss the subject. Scientist as prompter? Yes it seems fairly likely. But to what extent and how quickly will it happen? Surely scientists will still be able to at least give an outline of "their" work even in the future? Maybe? Otherwise maybe we it will be a sort of inversion of control, where the language model is the supervisor, and the humans in the loop are more like research assistants doing the dirty work? Instead of a human wearing an exoskeleton, an AI wearing a biological exoskeleton? But this can only be a temporary state of affairs as we won't be needed for that forever. A scientific project without human involvement? If a paper is published in a journal and no human wrote it and no human read it, is it really science? Does it really advance knowledge. Probably?
- neilv 4mo agoOne of the better-written ones I've seen. Am sending it around to some professors.
- firefoxd 4mo agoDo note that this was written in December 2025, and we have experienced leaps in capabilities since then. Her methods are outdated. Since January, I've been employed at 3 jobs, fulltime, by using ProxyAI [0]. I'm Chair in several universities. For all I know, I'm also part of several projects. Don't let this kind of blatant discrimination affect you. The future is bright. Note: the service is free once you give it access to your bank account. [0]: https://getproxyai.com/ https://getproxyai.com/ Edit: downvote from the haters, it's ok this account is managed by my proxy.
- root_axis 4mo agoThe TAM for ProxyAI is even bigger than SpaceX's. Hopefully they IPO soon.
- InsideOutSanta 4mo agoThe TAM is infinity, since agents need their own agents, which need their own agents, and so on.
- wiseowise 4mo ago> stress free > fomo nomo > talk walk This is golden.
- ahartmetz 4mo agoI also like "Terms | Privacy | Terms" at the bottom. It's... that kind of weird error.
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- low_tech_love 4mo agoIt’s a joke and all but also not really? You might have to go do a chalk talk at some point, and that is basically the only part of this article that is actually not real. The rest (about how everyone in academia is prompting everything) is absolutely VERY real. The word around all the scientific communities which I’m in contact with (to be honest, not so many) is basically “oh, there is no way to stop it, so we’ll embrace it”. All the conferences which I’m active in (say a handful of them) are just pretending nothing is happening and dealing only with blatant and obvious exaggerated cases. If you’re good at prompting, you’ll prompt, and there is no way in hell someone that doesn’t prompt has any chance at all at, well, anything academic really.
- tejohnso 4mo agoThe "not really" aspect is so significant that it's barely a joke. It's more serious and thought provoking than a simple joke. I guess that's how good satire works. This in particular I found quite interesting: "My research is a collaboration between me and several large language models. We are co-investigators. When you ask me to explain my research without ChatGPT, you are asking me to speak on behalf of a collaborator who is not in the room. " As people start to regard these LLMs or agents as collaborators rather than tools, it's going to become more realistic to make a statement like that. When I use a hammer, I can't ask it what type and size of nail I should use to do the job. It can only help me with the physical hammering. But when writing with an agent there is a conversation and some decision making that it is responsible for. I might go down a path that I otherwise would not have thought of on my own. And then there's the possibility that I also talk to it about my personal life and have an emotional relationship with it. I could easily see someone wanting to credit their AI agent as a recognized partner in their work.
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- ShinyLeftPad 4mo ago"decision making that a chatbot is responsible for" is a pretty wild statement, though there's a few to choose from
- g42gregory 4mo agoI hope people understand that this is a satire. :-)
- SteinsGoat 4mo agoI mean... this has to be satirical, right? Surely nobody in the field of academia is this limited in their ability....
- InsideOutSanta 4mo agoSounds like you should feed the article into ChatGPT to find out whether it is satire.
- Cpoll 4mo ago> this has to be satirical, right? Right. > Surely nobody in the field of academia is this limited in their ability.... Wrong.
- whatsakandr 4mo agoReminds me of a sub plot from Accelerando. Wasn't a huge fan of the book but it left an impression.
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- krallja 4mo ago> It is, in other words, a ritual designed in 1974 and never updated. The Chalk Talk was not invented after the IBM System/360. This entire article is clearly a joke.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4mo agoI would guess this is a tongue-in-cheek essay (I hope), but it’s probably kind of prescient. I’m old enough to remember when calculators were banned from classrooms, for almost the exact same reasons that people are giving against AI. It’s really only a matter of time.
- Dylan16807 4mo agoI don't really follow this comparison. The protagonist was able to use an AI in the same ways they could use a calculator or most tools. You don't use them in the middle of delivering a presentation.
- ChrisMarshallNY 4mo agoSure you do (but I’m pretty sure the original was a joke). Calculators, computers, phones, etc., are standard parts of any design meeting, these days. I interviewed a number of folks, over the years, that brought laptops, and used them to demonstrate their work.
- Dylan16807 4mo agoI've never used a calculator in a meeting. And while people will bring a laptop for convenience it's usually to show slides, a thing that can be easily enough done without the laptop. Or to take notes, which is even easier to do by hand. And a smartphone isn't needed at all. So, really, I don't think the comparison works out. The calculator is the example that's most directly an important tool that short-circuits something you could do by hand. But again, I've never used one in a meeting and it's not the kind of thing you'd be doing much of in a meeting.
- epihelix 4mo agoIn research science, it's very normal to require zero aids at an interview, and has been for some time. No calculators, no laptops, no phones -- just you. Yes, you'll also give a seminar with slides to present your prior work, but the whole point of the chalktalk is that it's you, and you alone, presenting your future plans. You're grilled by the faculty on your ideas, and you have to defend yourself without any props or crutches.
- avaer 4mo agoA funny piece, but what if all of the following are true: - AI *is* how real research is done - Incentives are such that this is how researchers must work - Academia institution does not have a structure to accept this reality Academia did this to itself. By hiring based on volume of output/citations, the way for researchers to win is to game the system better than the next person. AI just exposes that the old power structure doesn't serve much academic purpose. Maybe we should take away the grants from the universities and put them into autoresearch loops + human reviewers?
- JumpCrisscross 4mo agoThe chalkboard test is useful despite textbooks existing. The point is if you can’t problem solve “in memory,” there is a latency and limit to creativity fundamentally enforced by your ability to make connections. And in the end, if all you need is ChatGPT, a grad student is cheaper.
- solresol 4mo agoIn some fields, all of those statements are true already. In a large number of few fields, all of those statements will be true in the near future (10 years maximum). There's no reason that the Humboldtian model should be the right structure for the next century's universities, just as it wasn't the right structure for the 18th century's universities.
- dag100 4mo agoWow, I can't wait to live in a world where nobody knows how anything works, some people are arbitrarily rich and some arbitrarily poor with no ability to change their standing in life, and, worst of all, people celebrate these developments, even if they may be in the poor cohort, as progress.
- voakbasda 4mo agoIn other words, prepare to get medieval.
- 4mo ago
- devmor 4mo agoAh yes, and I wasn’t allowed a google search during my whiteboard interview, which was totally also discrimination. It is certainly not that case that the point of these exercises is to examine how you, as a person think and approach problems.
- xelxebar 4mo agoThis is about software developers.
- vonunov 4mo agoOh, hell! How the tables have pivoted. I was sitting here shaking my head at all the people who didn't realize this postdoc had written a satirical piece and wasn't really insisting that she should be allowed to use ChatGPT at her chalk talk. . . . Chalk talks aren't a thing! Anymore. It's about whiteboarding lmao
- vonunov 4mo agoOr are they? I don't know what to think anymore.
- calzakk 4mo agoEven in a couple of years, I think most devs are still going to be able to write pseudocode for a simple algorithm on a whiteboard, but anything involving real code is going to be difficult without AI. Unless you have side projects or work for a company that doesn't mandate heavy use of AI, you're going to lose your coding skills pretty quickly. Interviews for devs will change, it'll be far more high-level/architectural, rather than testing coding ability. Live coding tasks will inevitably require prompting AI, simply because that's where things are heading.
- troglodytetrain 4mo agoSo it is funny satire. But my wife is finishing up her PHd and according to her: all students are using ai and pretending they are not because the PI and other older leadership treat any use of ChatGPT or similar as plagiarism and not allowed at any stage. Which I think is simply stupid. I showed her how to use ChatGPT since Claude was blocking on all her request (biologist) and it has helped her massively improve the wording and structure of her paper as English is not a first language for her.
- casey2 4mo agoStrawman takes a hit AND IT GOES DOWN!!
- mcc1ane 4mo ago"The Evolution of Human Science"
- LennyHenrysNuts 4mo agoShe had me for the first 300 milliseconds. Very funny.
- otekengineering 4mo agoacademia will (hopefully) be an industry that benefits from, rather than degraded or obsoleted by, ai. the system should self-correct. scientists that use ai to give themselves more time to think will succeed and scientists that use ai to avoid thinking will fail. over the next few years processes and pedagogies should develop that help reliably guide researchers toward success. there's a lot of tedium in academia. ai taking menial tasks off the plates of grad students and post docs allows them to spend more time collaborating with, instead of serving, the head of the lab. dissertation defense is already a strong mitigation against producing folks like that satirical Dr. Simmons, you can't defend a dissertation if you don't have the chops for a chalk talk.
- watwut 4mo ago> When you ask me to explain my research without ChatGPT, you are asking me to speak on behalf of a collaborator who is not in the room. Would you ask a PI to give a talk without allowing them to mention the work of their postdocs? PI or that postdoc should be able to explain the project as such, without mentioning who exactly did what. They must talk about colleagues when attributing to protect and create their careers.