To Ai or not to Ai in academic writing, is that the question?

Figure generated with Dall-E asking to illustrate the use of ai in academic writing. Turned out to be interesting for me. One of the people on each subfigure meant to be the researcher and the other the Ai “assistance”, but which one is which?. Or it depends on who is seeing the figure, if it is a young researcher or a senior and how each one would relate differently with the Ai assistance and obtaining different features?

Recently I got an invitation to take a webinar to learn how to use Ai for my academic writing, for “just” $100 USD. I saw the description and it seems interesting, but do I really need someone to teach me this? Shouldn’t it be quite easy to find out…. Even more shouldn’t this be one of the main roles for Ai, for example Chat GPT ?

The following is the result of an afternoon playing with chat GPT to make myself a manual to learn how to integrate Ai into my Academic Writing, if that is something I would like to do, not necessarily the case.

Beyond the point of Ai as an academic writing assistance, this little exercise seems to me very illustraining in terms of how self education will be facilitated by intelligent use of Ai. As always I think there are domains of scientific writing in which using ai could be really good, and others where it should be self restricted to maintain control and creativity. In the same way there must be domains in the learning process where Ai will be used greatly with amazing results, and others in which we really have to embrace the slow artisan process of master-apprentice scheme.

A manual for incorporating Ai in academic writing created with Ai assistance