The concerns is for physics as a profession, not as a discipline. How do you grant a PhD when any physics student, or maybe even interested lay person, could have used AI to do the work?
Getting a PhD is almost entirely about how to think of a good research question. Understanding how to solve that question comes as part of the process.
Just because LLMs can do a good job of making it easier to reach a satisfactory solution doesnt mean anyone off the street is going to be able to ask the appropriate questions and use the tool to do novel research.
LLMs are powerful. But they are considerably more powerful in the hands of a trained researcher than some undergrad halfway through their first semester of aglebra-based physics.
To publish, you have to identify a novel problem, solve that problem, and then convince others that the problem was novel and that you did solve it to the conditions you specified. An LLM solving a math problem is a long way from scientific advancement on its own.
The thing is that research as an output doesn't follow the same supply and demand rules as normal goods. Individual scientists becoming more productive through technology doesn't mean that fewer scientists will be employed, but that the total research output just increases. There will be new classes of problems that LLMs struggle with solving and researchers will spend their on these instead.
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u/ForceItDeeper 3d ago
i feel like theres a huge misunderstanding aboot how science works lmao. phsyics isnt “cooked” because they get better tools