What should a paper be like in the age of AI?

What should a paper be like in the age of AI? What would an ideal paper—if such a thing even exists—look like? After writing a draft with AI, I feel a certain guilt. As I revise that guilt away, one word at a time, I find myself thinking once again about what makes a paper beautiful.

A paper is a creation. Even if it does not reveal knowledge that has never existed before, it still presents a combination that has never existed before. In that sense, an ideal paper should, perhaps, be artistic. Classical music is one of the great forms of creation that has been cited, borrowed from, and reused throughout a long history, continuing to shape modern music. Classical pieces are usually longer than modern songs. If you listen with patience, really feeling the theme, shutting out your other senses and simply waiting, the music eventually reaches a peak that pierces the brain. Its beauty comes from simplicity and repetition, from briefly pulling us outside the world, and from the sensation of being alive. A theme is introduced through piano, flute, and strings, then repeated with slight variations. With patience, we walk toward its core almost as naturally as we move toward the central idea of a paper. If I can trust the authors of a paper in the same way—trust that I do not need to run toward the destination on my own, because at some point a piece of cold ice will touch the sole of my foot and send a sharp sensation all the way to my brain—then I can enjoy the walk itself as I read. My classical episode on Spotify.

I am grateful that, back in 2023, when AI agents were not yet good enough to do everything for us, I had the chance to write at least one paper entirely by myself, from beginning to end. Writing every single word with my own hands, and studying how papers on similar topics developed their arguments, gave me something that cannot simply be taught by someone else. Self-generated knowledge and self-generated emotion are different from knowledge that we merely recognize and accept. And yet, the number of papers is growing exponentially. Writing papers with AI is becoming normal, and we have to accept that this normal will become the mainstream. If we insist on human writing nevertheless, we may eventually become organisms that simply failed to keep up with the times.