That question came to me suddenly yesterday as I was looking for journals to publish a research paper. Not as a critique. Not even as a complaint. More like a quiet hit. We live in a time where almost nobody including me reads the full paper anymore. Not the 30 pages of dense text, not the appendices, not even the abstract. We feed the PDF into LLMs, and it spits out exactly what we need. A summary. Key takeaways or outcomes. The time it takes to truly read something. Efficiently replaced.
It saves time. It gives access. We don’t need a PhD to understand something anymore. It teaches as if we are kids. Feynman saying, IYKYK. More tailored prompts are required. Mostly, LLMs are the first to reach a paper. It digest the content, chunk it, and deliver it clean and neat to the rest of us.
But then, Who are we writing for?
Because the old idea was simple. Publish, get cited, gain credibility, contribute to the field. But now, LLMs doesn’t care if your paper was published in Nature or some unknown journal. It doesn’t care about your impact factor or your h-index. It just reads. It pulls based on what’s relevant to the query.
Are we not writing for people, but for LLMs? I am not sure, whether we reached there yet. If that’s true, then the journal isn’t the final destination anymore. The model is.
LLMs are brilliant at summarizing. They are terrifyingly bad at connecting dots. But do they know when not to apply a finding? Does it understand the context? Do they know that a study on a small sample in a specific geography isn’t the applicable to all studies?
It is weird to notice that the research paper are evolving from a final product to a kind of raw material. So yeah. Who will read the research papers? Maybe no one. Maybe everyone. Or maybe just the machines. But some part of me still wonders what happens when no one reads the original anymore. Just layers of summaries, passed through models until the real voice gets lost.
Are we adding to a library, or just feeding a machine? Maybe both. Maybe that’s not as bad as it sounds. But someone should be asking, before we forget what it felt like to truly read.
Cheers!
PS: Yet to submit & even the pronouns are blurring for LLMs.
Check out the other post: What school never taught us!
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