The Shortcut Species

In athletics, steroids are no match for training and spirit. In science, AI hallucinations can’t beat research

We are living in the golden age of artificial enhancement, and things are getting weird. In science, the cathedral of human reason, AI-hallucinated citations have grown 1100% since ChatGPT’s public release. The peer review process has thrown up its hands. Down this path, once the integrity of its references is really shaken, scientific literature will lose all dependability. In sports, the Enhanced Games in Los Angeles, aka Olympics on Steroids, offered the proposition that athletes should be their most chemically-optimised superhuman selves. Yet, the ‘clean’ records held. 

Isn’t the obsession with shortcuts to greatness utterly cringe? The AI citation mills are a kind of intellectual performance-enhancing drug, which inflates the stats while hollowing out the science. The Enhanced Games turned out to be neither a sci-fi leap forward, nor a match for standard world-class training. What both these stories share is an anxious soul – a creeping suspicion that human effort, unassisted, is somehow no longer enough. That the researcher who actually reads their sources is at a disadvantage, and the athlete who simply trains is running the wrong race.

This isn’t a nice snapshot of the human condition, that given any technology capable of making us genuinely better, people will first use it to just make themselves look better. They will actively pollute the foundation of future science because they’re too lazy to open a second tab, and check if a paper actually exists. But Usain Bolt and Alan Turing didn’t move the needle of human potential by cheating the clock. True ambition means actually doing the heavy lifting. The view from the giant’s shoulders is genuinely awesome, only when you’ve taken the trouble to climb up there yourself. We keep trying to engineer our way out of sweat and friction, but it keeps being the point.