Teens are doing AI research now. Is that a good thing?
And how I'm starting 2025.
Two weeks into 2025, and this year is already shaping up to be challenging in so many ways. I spent the holidays catching up on books (Intermezzo is my fourth Sally Rooney novel, and I still don’t get the appeal; now I’m devouring R. F. Kuang’s Babel), movies (highlights: A Complete Unknown, The Brutalist, Nickel Boys, A Different Man), and TV (Black Doves, Say Nothing, A Man on the Inside, and for the first time, Sex in the City). I’ve been doing a lot of sleeping, walking, running, and yoga — that is, when I’m not refreshing Watch Duty and the L.A. Times to keep up with the wildfires incinerating Southern California, where I grew up. Mostly, I’ve been thinking about how I want to show up and contribute during a year in which the only certainty is that everything will be unpredictable.
Of course, I’ll be writing about the Trump administration’s direct and indirect effects on science, academia, and research — more on all of that to come. But another area I’m interested in is the intersection of artificial intelligence and research: how AI is changing the nature of knowledge production, and how research about AI is changing.
Two recent stories of mine explore these overlapping themes. I wrote about the phenomenon of seemingly clear-cut, but undisclosed, instances of AI-generated writing (i.e. “I am an AI language model”) popping up in journals that supposedly prohibit undisclosed AI-generated writing. I examined some reasons why they may not be enforcing their policies, and if it’s even possible to do so.
This week, I also wrote about the world’s biggest AI conference holding a research competition — for teens. Kids these days! Undoubtedly there are smart, driven Gen Zers who relish the opportunity, like Weichen Huang, an 18-year-old from Ireland whom I interviewed. But I also heard from computer scientists who said that the last thing this ultra-competitive field needs to do is foster even more competition among stressed-out high schoolers. (These stories are free to read by making an account with your email. Thanks for supporting journalism!)
Let me know if you have ideas for what I should write about next — and take care of yourself.