Article by Solomon Messing and Joshua A. Tucker: “A viral blog post recently compared the current moment in artificial intelligence (AI) to February 2020, just before COVID-19 turned the world upside down. While that analogy may be flawed, it’s hard to ignore recent developments with AI coding agents,1 which prompted our colleague Andy Hall to post that AI agents are coming for the social sciences “like a freight train.”
Here’s why we agree: in just the past month, we’ve used AI coding agents to do the following: (1) transform a minimal implementation of a method to analyze heterogenous treatments and treatment effects into a fully functional, modular, and well-documented R package in a just over a day; (2) produced a twenty-page summary for our own edification of business responses to the Russian invasion of Ukraine based on materials found on this website, including data visualizations, statistical analyses, and a complete replication file in under an hour; (3) developed the infrastructure, data collection, analysis, and reporting pipeline for a pilot study examining what kinds of political prompts LLMs refuse to address across five languages and five frontier models.
Yes, those of us working in the academy have been wrestling with what generative AI means for teaching for a few years now, and lots of us have begun to integrate generative AI into routine tasks like summarizing papers and even coding assistance. But the current moment feels like it could be quite different, and we suspect many things in the academy are about to change…(More)”.
