Referencing my desire to disprove that AI is “merely a stochastic parrot,” Claude told me that “political theory may be the one field where ‘stochastic parrot’ is actually a compliment, since the whole discipline consists of creatively recombining things Tocqueville and Mill already said.” Ouch.
Professors at top universities are — in good part because of what it now takes to get a good job in the field — more focused on publishing erudite contributions to niche debates in scholarly journals which only a handful of their colleagues will ever read than on teaching and mentoring the ever-dwindling ranks of their students.
Yascha Mounk gets an AI to write an academic paper in political theory and says the result is more or less indistinguishable from papers written by experts in the field