Comment by MITSardine
6 days ago
In the classic division, "teaching" consists in giving undergraduate classes, and "research" consists in the whole spectrum between working all on your own and managing a PhD factory (3+ students a year).
So this article is really not saying anything controversial in the strictly ontological side of things, in fact it's already a relatively common stance to prefer supervising few (or, more rarely, none at all) students.
This researcher is saying "when I consider hiring someone as a workhorse, I might prefer AI instead"; what's the harm in that? Too many PhD students are used as disposable cheap labor, seeing little personal growth in their PhD journey and being generally neglected and abused.
I feel like people undervalue the learning experience of just being a workhorse for a while. It's a lot easier to do, make and correct errors when you start with the simpler stuff under guidance
The authors itself writes:
>I would recruit a graduate student into my lab and allow them to run with the project, providing guidance along the way.
You say to many phd students are used as disposable cheap labor, but what is the amount of people still learning stuff maybe bigger?