This is such an important question, Peter and I appreciate your thoughtfulness while thinking it through. My one quibble would be with this paragraph: "Some folks think that AI is a great way to summarize sources and research. Maybe combine that with having AI serve as a search engine. "ChatGPT, find me sources about symbiosis in water-dwelling creatures." The problem is that AI is bad at all those things. Its summarizing abilities are absolutely unreliable and it is not a good search engine, both because it tends to make shit up and because its training data is probably not up to date." I think you are thinking of AI perhaps 18 months ago. The new Deep Research models (which i've written about here (https://fitzyhistory.substack.com/p/deep-research-in-the-age-of-ai) are significantly better at conducting research, especially if you use detailed and specific prompts designed to separate out sources. Just something to think about.
This is such an important question, Peter and I appreciate your thoughtfulness while thinking it through. My one quibble would be with this paragraph: "Some folks think that AI is a great way to summarize sources and research. Maybe combine that with having AI serve as a search engine. "ChatGPT, find me sources about symbiosis in water-dwelling creatures." The problem is that AI is bad at all those things. Its summarizing abilities are absolutely unreliable and it is not a good search engine, both because it tends to make shit up and because its training data is probably not up to date." I think you are thinking of AI perhaps 18 months ago. The new Deep Research models (which i've written about here (https://fitzyhistory.substack.com/p/deep-research-in-the-age-of-ai) are significantly better at conducting research, especially if you use detailed and specific prompts designed to separate out sources. Just something to think about.