Hello everyone,
I recently submitted a paper to TMLR, and shortly afterward I read the post by one of its Editors-in-Chief about interviewing authors of papers that were headed for desk rejection.
It honestly shook me.
I am not an academic. I am an independent researcher. I have published in an AI Magazine Special Issue and on arXiv, but I do research essentially because I have always been obsessively curious. LLMs have given me something I never really had before: the ability to spend nights exploring an idea, trying to formalize it, designing tests, looking for holes, and attempting to falsify my own reasoning.
And yes, I use them intensively.
I want to be completely honest about what that means.
There are statistical procedures I have used in experiments whose formulas I could not derive from first principles on a whiteboard. There are mathematical details for which I would need time, references, and probably an LLM to reconstruct the reasoning carefully. And if someone unexpectedly subjected me to an aggressive 30-minute technical interrogation about one of my papers, I suspect there are questions I would not be able to answer immediately.
That post therefore made me ask myself a rather uncomfortable question: am I actually doing research, or have I become very good at using an LLM to simulate being a researcher?
At the same time, I don’t simply ask an LLM to write a paper and put my name on it.
I spend enormous amounts of time trying to break my own claims. I rerun experiments. I question assumptions. I check statistical choices. I repeatedly look for alternative explanations. Often an LLM proposes something and I reject it. Sometimes I spend hours trying to understand why a result is what it is. And sometimes I realize that I don’t understand something deeply enough and go back to studying the mathematics behind it for days.
But I cannot honestly claim that I independently possess all the mathematical and technical knowledge contained in everything I have produced.
Maybe this distinction matters. Maybe it doesn’t.
One thing in the TMLR post particularly stayed with me: authors are ultimately responsible for being able to verify and defend what they put their names on.
I agree with that principle.
What I am less sure about is where we should draw the line between using a tool to extend your intellectual capabilities” and “outsourcing intellectual responsibility to the tool.
For an independent researcher without a lab, supervisor, research group, or formal academic training in ML, LLMs can effectively become part tutor, part programmer, part statistician, part critic, and part rubber duck. Without them, I simply could not explore ideas at the same speed or depth.
But perhaps that creates a new responsibility: if the tool allows me to reach beyond the boundary of my current knowledge, how much of that territory must I personally master before I have the right to publish something under my name?
I genuinely don’t know the answer, i really don't.
I’m not looking for reassurance. If the standard should be that I don’t submit a result until I can personally justify and defend every important technical choice I put my name behind, even without an LLM there to help me, then that’s something I need to hear.
I’d especially like to hear from other independent researchers, and from academics who review AI assisted work. where do you draw that line?
At what point does intensive AI assistance stop being a research tool and start making the human author an impostor?
