Stephen Turner scales back AI writing amid slop concerns

A full professor at the University of Chicago has published more than 200 papers and 14 books this year, a number computational biologist Stephen D. Turner cites early in a blog post explaining why his own relationship with AI is changing.

Turner is not renouncing the tools. He is pulling back from letting them write. "My inboxes (personal and otherwise) are filled with slop. My social feeds are filled with slop," he writes, and the same tide, he argues, has reached academic publishing. He points to a case surfaced by TMLR editor Nihar Shah in which "three authors couldn't answer basic questions about their papers, and three more struggled with technical details."

The economic frame he borrows is Giorgio Gilestro's "Weimar of Knowledge": "the marginal cost of producing content is essentially zero, but the cost of attention is still high."

Turner's own accounting is domain by domain. Code, yes: he says he has been "using Claude Code extensively to make little throwaway web apps to demonstrate a concept to my students." Fact-checking, yes; for a recent biosecurity preprint he describes running "a multi-agent workflow to check my work against the papers I cited, including numbers and stats and my descriptions of their findings." Writing and thinking, less. "Every time I delegated the writing I missed out on much of the _thinking_," he writes.

He invokes Keynes: "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?" His own bottom line is flatter. "I still use AI, just more judiciously," he writes. "I want to remain capable of doing the work I put my name on."