> Let there be a market for academia

There are such markets, in every national budget. It’s been less than a full electoral cycle in many places since “AI” improved from a questionable typing-saving gimmick into something that can deliver arguably passable results autonomously, in some areas.

> It is time we remove this intermediary who does this.

Academia got tax grants because we have already figured out pure market forces don’t exactly nurture it so well. It got its slice of pie through gaining mindshare of people who thought paying for that is a good idea.

Now there’s this dilemma over what’s exactly is this “that” - that we believe in paying for.

But given that we collectively believe it is a good thing our taxes go to academics, I fail to see how removing that would be a good idea. Some say there are bad apples, and we cut off the whole tree that gave us plenty of good fruit as we nurtured it?

Something like a direct democracy over R&D appropriations might make more sense than a market… but then it’s not unprecedented (and quite likely) that such system would get dominated by all sorts of quackery. The feedback loop here is really long and convoluted - it’s not a Kickstarter.

So we’re probably best with old slow bureaucracy, steered by politicians, figuring out how to navigate it minimizing risks of any major setbacks. Surely, some possible budget leeches (if we look from our plumber’s viewpoint) are lesser of possible evils here?

You seem to assume a case where academics write papers by single shotting from one prompt. Of course such papers are useless, but this is not how I at least use LLMs to write. I iterate the text in thousands of turns. I do tend to type all the final text in the manuscript too, sometimes editing it in the process. My current manuscript's session has about about 50k input tokens by me in about 1.6k individual messages. The manuscript currently is about 8k words (11k tokens). In total the session has about 50M tokens.

One frustrating, and very inefficient, part of the (lack of) division of labour in academia is that everyone has to write. And academic text has very particular format and demads, and writing it is a skill of its own. It's like asking that every software dev should be also be technical writers and write production level user manuals and ad copys on top.

And a lot more things than the writing goes into the paper. Designing, implementing and conducting the experiments. Studying, visualizing and analyzing the data. Interpreting the results in light of theory and previous literature. None of these require writing in the sense of writing a paper.

I would be ecstatic, and be a lot less wasteful in spending grant money, if I could stop wasting time writing the research in papers, and instead dump a git repo with some READMEs. But at least for now I have to also write the papers, but with LLMs maybe at 2x speed and with a lot less bad output.

This is a rehash of an age-old complaint: "I shouldn't have to pay taxes for things I don't personally want or need". A lot of people made that argument, and it does not seem to resonate with the voters. You're naively hoping that AI has finally made it compelling. I wouldn't hold my breath.

You may even be right that a lot of academic prose is suddenly cheap. But just think about the hardest cases of self-justification in academia: classics or literature. These don't promise your hypothetical plumber anything. It's not like he'll ever read a classics journal. People have made your exact arguments against them for half a century, and these departments are still funded. Heck, when "I'd rather give my money to Hollywood" couldn't even defund film studies, "the AI can write a passable essay" has little hope of defunding academia in general.

You could hire a PhD student or tutor to write you an essay or answer your questioms way before Fable 5.1, but hypothetical plumbers cared little either way, so the public commitment to university funding is not about whether plumbers can get the outputs somewhere else.

The government funds academia for the institutions themselves, and the voters who depend on the institutions are not fringe. In many US states the university system is among the largest employers, a huge share of voters are alumni or parents of students, or business owners who depend on selling food on campus, etc. Their stake is high, they're willing to vote on it: the hypothetical plumer's stake is a few marginal dollars which he won't even get since the budget will allocate it elsewhere, on some other service he probably doesn't use. And he doesn't read journal content eiter way. So you'll keep paying your fair share for it, because it's up to the voters, and they care little for what you personally want.

> I am capable of paying the AI provider myself.

If that was true then slack, linear, … would be out of business.

Yes, anyone can pay the provider, but not everyone can ask the right questions, followup, generally give the question the attention it deserves.

There are heaps of problems with academia, and poor writing is just one of them. It existed pre AI. Whoever produced slop pre-AI now produces more of it. The good ones still stand out.