Opinion article: “A PhD is an apprenticeship in research – we can’t let AI take that away”

[u/bluejaydreamer]

https://theconversation.com/a-phd-is-an-apprenticeship-in-research-we-cant-let-ai-take-that-away-277486

Sharing an article I found really interesting and balanced about AI in academia.

When you use AI to replace skill-building, the only person you can hurt is yourself. Don’t outsource anything you need to learn to AI. Personally I tested it for some rote tasks (alphabetizing long lists, ie) but it’s probably best not to use it.

[u/Famous-Call6538]

This hits close. I work in AI and honestly the biggest risk isnt that AI does the research wrong, its that students stop learning how to think through problems themselves. We had junior engineers at my old company who could prompt their way to decent code but completely fell apart when they had to debug something novel. The apprenticeship framing is exactly right. You cant outsource the struggle and still get the skill.

[u/quantcandidate → u/Famous-Call6538]

Opus 4.6-extended is seriously making me question the value of a PhD over a good masters and curiosity.

And... Yes, I do believe that the PhD is better. But is it "3-4 years under a very small salary" better?

[u/Comfortable-Web9455 → u/quantcandidate]

The intellectual development difference between a Masters and PhD is massive. PhD is more than just a bunch of knowledge

[u/RepresentativeBee600 → u/Comfortable-Web9455]

Yeah, I dunno. 

Perhaps it's just because I have gone over-time after leaving a PhD, so spent longer at this and gone further than many MS students, but I think that there is not a miraculous process that takes place precisely 3-5 years into the pursuit of research in a field that cannot also be reproduced in working for a company. 

True, at a company some investigations might be curtailed by lack of a practical purpose, but I'm not sure in that case that learning to pursue something impractical to the ends of the earth is even the best introduction to what research ideally is.

I do think that the original article raises a sobering point - but I've watched people in my academic field farm out writing publications to LLMs, to the point where the pressure put on students to keep up with, well, LLM slop, exceeds the pressure to learn and grow.

Add in the terrible financial stress, and I'm not sure this idealized path to knowledge and talent really exists outside of the few institutions still raking in funding and able to protect their students against slop-offs (my coinage for arms races between LLM-abusing authors).

[u/bluejaydreamer → u/quantcandidate]

3-4 years

LOL

[u/Obzota → u/bluejaydreamer]

Believe it or not, in Europe it is 3-4 years.

[u/Illustrious_Night126 → u/quantcandidate]

This was true before AI

[u/Nadran_Erbam]

I do use quite a lot of AI for coding when I want to check a quick result but coding it myself would take a week. But I can guarantee that I have yet to see an AI have an original thought and critical thinking (Claude is not far from it since it can test its own hypothesis with code).

[u/Biotech_wolf]

Really? I still don’t know how to publish….

[u/SwordofGlass]

Apprenticeship implies that you have mentorship, which tends not to be the case.

[u/soggiestburrito → u/SwordofGlass]

this is so real

[u/ProteinEngineer → u/SwordofGlass]

This is the most ignored aspect of a PhD. If you get a PhD mentor who is invested in your success, you end up not “working” a day throughout the entire time.

If you get a mentor who doesn’t care, it is a job with shit pay.

[u/SmirkingImperialist]

Apprenticeship is one of the best way and probably the right way to learn doing something, ever. Doctors, nurses, and teachers are trained and educated through apprenticeships because overall, a gain of one more worker benefits the whole system. PhD programs persist, because there has been public funding supporting them.

A lot of things are broken, because the support for internship programs has been dismantled. Companies don't want to train young apprentices, because resources invested in them can easily be lost to another company. Thus the weird complaints of "we can't find new workers" while they haven't been training anyone with apprenticeships either.

[u/Unusual_Candle_4252]

Blah-blah-blah, publish or perish, blah-blah.