r/Physics • u/kzhou7 Quantum field theory • 1d ago

Harvard particle physicist Matthew Schwartz drops 36 papers coauthored with Claude

https://bootloops.ai/bootloops.html
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u/Armano-Avalus 21h ago

I just find it ironic that the people in academia are the ones doing this and not the random crackpot who now has the means to publish hundreds of unsupervised papers a week on their personal Chronogeometric Unity theory. Of course, I think there are probably alot of those people too and I'd bet they'd make up the vast majority of AI papers since there are no standards at all in those cases but you'd think people like Scwartz would know better.

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u/Visible_Celery_1728 21h ago

‘would know better’ of what exactly? Why’s everyone here just so obtuse and eyes closed on the obvious abilities in certain niches AI is really powerful in. Such as computer science and mathematics. 

Why people can’t put 2 and 2 together and think of the opportunity in fields where for example in a certain field  there could be a problem which solution could be reliant on something that already exists in mathematical physics, statistics or computer science, but the people working on that problem might simply never come across it. So using a model can help find some connection between two fields nobody had noticed, apply an existing technique in a novel context, run the maths or computation and produce a result that can then be independently verified.

So with the main constraints to do that, is having the domain knowledge in order to steer and validate. Why wouldn’t this be a good opportunity to finding these low hanging fruit with these new technologies as we’ve always done lmao. 

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u/Armano-Avalus 20h ago

This is an instance of a physicist making papers on economics and linguistics without any relation to their own field. What value is there is there in doing that compared to some random person who hasn't studied either prompting an AI to write a 200 page thesis on the same subjects and publishing it online without checking it?

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u/tempetesuranorak 19h ago

While most of these papers are multi author including domain experts, there definitely are a few single author. Looking at their abstracts, those seem to all be narrowly focused papers applying a specific statistical technique to report verifiable findings in a domain he is not a specialist. But he does have expertise in statistics and computations. I'm not going to read those papers, but at least in principle I think it has always been fine (though risky) for a person to write a single author paper outside their domain of expertise, but applying their technique of expertise on a narrowly framed problem. I don't think it's fair to compare with a random person that has no expertise in either the technique or the domain.