Mostly agree... but of course in many fields, research is a distributed & collaborative activity, of which PIs are "managers" of a sort: RAs doing lit searches, lab techs doing experiments, colleagues & collabs shaping conclusions. LLMs are different than that, and problematic. But it's not B + W.
In some ways, we might ask: what labour is made invisible by invoking the primacy of the PI/author? How might LLMs threaten (human) academic labour of all kinds, while remaining problematically invisibilized? We def need good politics/ethics around this.
Most definitely. Who’s disappeared in the research process is bigger than LLMs. A polisci grad student once told me how disillusioned they were to find out that big-name academics published so much b/c they outsource so much work to grad students. (My work FWIW is definitely small-batch artisanal.)
Mmmmm artisanal 🤤
Reminds me of the acknowledgements to a recent international law academic bestseller that thanked about two dozen research assistants. Made me wonder how much the listed author actually contributed to “their” book. In any case, LLMs throw gasoline on the whole problem.
There are of course other practices we could point to: in their lab, my colleague @maxliboiron.bsky.social emphasizes research relations in how authorship & “credit” are (collaboratively) assigned.