An interactive companion to the thought experiment on AI, writing, and scholarly contribution
This exercise accompanies the blog post "The Research Is Not the Manuscript." The idea is simple: simplify the research paper-writing process to four steps.
In the thought experiment, the human scholar always does Steps 1 and 4. AI does either Step 2 or Step 3. The question is: where do you feel the intellectual contribution lives?
Below are 20 tasks involved in writing a research paper. Sort each one based on whether you would be comfortable with AI performing it. There are no right or wrong answers — go with your gut.
Important: For each task, assume it is all or nothing — either AI performs the entire task or you do it entirely yourself. The exercise works best when you set aside the realities of partial AI involvement and commit to a binary choice.
Each task you sorted belongs to a stage of the paper-writing process. Some are part of the topic sentence outline (Step 2) and some are part of the full draft (Step 3). Here is how your sorting mapped onto those stages:
Each task now shows its stage. Notice where you drew your comfort line.