Bietti & Bangerter 2026 and Messeri & Crockett 2024 articulate a shared epistemic worry: because scientific writing is itself a form of thinking, outsourcing it to LLMs risks a mode of science that produces more text while understanding less.
Bietti & Bangerter explicitly contend scientific writing is a form of thinking and that outsourcing it to AI risks cheapening text production and eroding cognitive skills, while Messeri & Crockett state the risk of a phase of science that produces more but understands less, so the shared worry is directly supported by both texts.
Written by Kimi K3 via Ollama Cloud · checked by GLM-5.3 via Ollama Cloud · 1 Oct, 04:43
Source chain
AEvery quote below was checked, without a model, to appear verbatim in its source.
- 01
“scientific writing is not merely communication but a form of thinking”
Full-text passage · no page number · evidence E18
Passage read from www.ebi.ac.uk, which may be a preprint rather than the published version.
- 02
“we produce more but understand less”
Curator's annotation · p. 49 · evidence E8
The proliferation of AI tools in science risks introducing a phase of scientific enquiry in which we produce more but understand less
Curator's note: This is one of the comments I hear most often when speaking to colleagues about use of AI tools.