I author those kinds of papers routinely for work unfortunately. Usually closer to 30-40 pages but there are graphs so I guess that takes a few pages off. But….yeah…
this post was submitted on 08 Jun 2026
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me_irl
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I never learned to bullshit much, and my default behaviour when i don't know shit is doing nothing. Can anyone explain why i didn't get a degree?
It's strawman rage bait. You can say the same thing about sailing vs combustion engine shipping, programming via C on notepad vs modern development environments and languages, etc.
The missing context is the time required when you know what you're doing. And yeah sometimes walking is still faster than driving a car. But let's not pretend we're not seeing a major shift like industrialization or the internet. Both of which have fucked up society and the world in countless ways as much as it has benefited us.
I can write a solid 10 page well-researched paper out of a library in two weeks. With the internet, I can write that same paper with even better research in one week. With AI tools, I can write that same paper with better readability, conciseness, and overall editing in a couple days.
What's the cost? Probably not pretty, but the deadline is a lot shorter than it used to be now. And that's the reality most people will find themselves in now.
I can write a solid 10 page well-researched paper out of a library in two weeks. With the internet, I can write that same paper with even better research in one week. With AI tools, I can write that same paper with better readability, conciseness, and overall editing in a couple days.
The difference is that, despite you knowing how to reach the end goal, someone who doesn't understand any of what you do could match your output of "a couple days" in 3-4 days' time. It cheapens the value of actually understanding what you're talking about. Using LLMs might feel more immediately productive, but in the long term it's diluting the skill pool, making it harder to distinguish between deep and shallow knowledge, and allowing (the idea of) merit-based priority to land upon those who don't deserve it more often than it already does (not that I believe our society is largely merit-based anyways).
Sure, the knowledgable can get a lot more done in less time, but the unknowledgable can more easily pretend to be knowledgable, and that technical debt will accumulate heavily over time.