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haritha-jtoday at 9:11 AM3 repliesview on HN

The largest output of a PhD has always been the training to the student, not the thesis itself, hence why we're called 'students'. Anyone claiming that a thesis can be generated by AI is missing the point. AI can also do everything an undergrad can do, we don't claim that undergrad education has been blown to bits. At best, we say we need better modes of evaluation, and perhaps that's true for PhDs as well.

I submitted my thesis this month at a QS top 10 uni after nearly 4 years of work. LLMs were available for most of that time. I don't really feel that it has diminished the value of my thesis by much really.


Replies

tgvtoday at 9:57 AM

And how is the PhD student trained? By doing research and writing about it by him/herself.

> we don't claim that undergrad education has been blown to bits

But it has been. People pass CS classes without knowing how to write even a simple program. How do you think they'll fare?

As a meme said: you'd better start eating real healthy, because your future doctor will graduate using chatgpt.

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ShinyLeftPadtoday at 9:48 AM

> we don't claim that undergrad education has been blown to bits

We don't??

Chance-Devicetoday at 9:16 AM

You’re sort of saying that’s because your thesis had no value to begin with, because it’s mainly a teaching exercise. I’m not saying that it doesn’t have value by the way, I’m sure it was good, that’s just my read of your post.

It’s an interesting subject. Makes me want to vibe code a PhD generator just like in the tweet. Maybe I will.

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