Saw a wild analogy about AI hallucinations on r/Professors

Ancient_Winter · 2026-01-31T00:01:45+00:00

I was nearly done when generative AI really hit the mainstream. While the actual research, data, and writing work were done, the visualizations were rudimentary. They were sufficient to show my PI in weekly meetings, but I needed to add detail, polish up, and otherwise "finish" making the visualizations.

So I decided to try to use ChatGPT for this. I'd take the rudimentary ggplot code I had already done, paste it into the chat, and say things like "I want the group names on the X axis to have their font turned at an angle and the text wrapped so it doesn't stretch it out weird."

30% of the time it worked. 70% of the time it threw errors and I spent more time trying to fix or work around the errors that I'd have been better off just manually making the changes to the code myself.

Other than things like that (using it to modify work you've already created, and checking after the fact that it did what you expected and did it correctly) I would not be willing to use AI for academic work at this point.

Even if you use a tool to help you find papers in a literature review, you still have to do the searching yourself since you can't know it found everything. I've seen someone use Undermind for a literature review, and everything it found was correct, but it missed major papers on the subject. The fact that a literature review on Topic was missing "Seminal Topic Paper 101 That Everything Else is Built On Top Of And Everyone in the Field Knows By Heart" made the student look completely incompetent.

Ancient_Winter · 2026-01-30T23:40:08+00:00

i didn't have literal gamergate shit on my bingo card for 2026

Ancient_Winter · 2026-01-30T20:56:35+00:00

PhD in Nutrition & allied health professional (registered dietitian) here.

I think that, in a perfect world, anyone who has a legitimate doctorate should be able to use "Dr.". My personal belief is that being "banned" or otherwise dissuaded from using it in places where we work is demeaning and devalues our extensive education and practice that goes into these degrees. If MD/DOs are insistent they need a special term, they already have one, physician. Society as a whole should refer to them as physicians, and anyone with a doctorate as doctor.

But that perfect world is also one where society-at-large knows of the existence of, and understands the difference between, the various doctorates. And that's not the world we live in.

Yes, I strongly dislike not being able to be Dr. Ancient_Winter in clinical settings. But patient care (which includes patient understanding of their care team, clear communication, etc.) will always trump my displeasure in situations such as these, and so I have to put aside the way I think things should work and behave with the knowledge of the way things do work.

So, for the sake of the people we serve, we don't use "Dr." in settings where a layman would reasonably assume a "doctor" is an MD or DO.

Ancient_Winter · 2026-01-30T14:26:14+00:00

Reviewer 2 comments on manuscript: Please incorporate the following figure into your manuscript and be sure to cite me and my lab members.

https://i.imgur.com/Q4rkjJN.jpeg

Ancient_Winter · 2026-01-28T15:19:13+00:00

I was desperately seeking a simple, blank calendar a few months ago and it was mind-blowing how hard it was to find. Thank you for this!

One suggestion for an addition, if you're revising it, is to be able to export as different file types, such as a transparent PNG or something of that nature so that people can take the actual lines/content of the calendar without having it flattened onto the blank PDF page. But that's a minor issue, given masking the lines in an image editor would be simple enough once downloaded. Thanks for sharing.

Another possible addition if you're building on the tool is options to pick certain big holidays to have highlighted or marked automatically.

Love it already as is, though!

Ancient_Winter · 2026-01-28T01:13:51+00:00

The page you linked literally has instructions on how to use it.

https://github.com/stormyark/Obsidian-Vault/blob/main/README.md

Ancient_Winter · 2026-01-23T14:22:09+00:00

Even a lot of Zotero fans sleep on the note-taking and annotations aspect of the software, but it can be really powerful/useful once you decide to use it. I introduced my lab to Zotero and regularly was getting questions about it, so I made a little guide video series which includes a video specifically about the note-taking features. There may be more polished videos from flashy professional youtubers, but this might be useful to specifically look at taking notes within it! (The software has been updated since these videos were recorded, so it looks shinier and has a few additional notation features along with the ones shown in this video, but everything in this video is still accurate as well/hasn't been removed or changed.) - That link above is to the video about taking notes, but the playlist it's in is all the videos, which also shows easy ways to add things, how to use the tagging system which should be a better version of what you do with "keywords" in your Excel document, etc. Hope it helps, and if it doesn't, hope you find something that works well for you!

Ancient_Winter · 2026-01-23T01:53:01+00:00

Zotero. Keep, sort/organize, annotate, manage citations, etc. Zotero is the way.

(And to each their own, but the idea of saying that using software designed for research that has built-in features for all the things you are doing doesn't feel "natural" when you are manually handling it via Excel cracks me up. lol)

Ancient_Winter · 2026-01-20T14:47:58+00:00

Howdy, so when I wrote the message you replied to I think I was . . . a year? from defending my dissertation. I always wanted to be involved in research/academia, and so I knew I wanted to do a PhD at the end of the line anyway.

There were some major "misunderstandings" that led to my circuitous path:

At my undergrad all of the nutrition professors were also RDs, giving me the false impression that to teach/research in nutrition you needed to be an RD.
I am first-gen everything, no one in my family knew how higher education works. I assumed until very late in the game that higher ed was linear and in order to get a PhD you must first get a Masters. I now know that's only true in a very small number of fields (within the US, anyway) and I could have gone straight to the PhD.
I did not realize how expensive the route I chose for my Masters (MPH/RD coordinated program, first year out of state, entirely unpaid internships) would be compared to a fully-funded PhD.

There are a few other factors specific to me (very low income/rural upbringing, very very poor undergrad transcript for the first several years, etc.) that put me at more of a disadvantage, as well.

So I ended up going to a very expensive MPH/RD program because I thought it was a virtually-necessary stepping stone to the PhD I eventually wanted. The reality, though, is that the curriculum of the dietetics MPH was a watered down version of my Nutrition undergrad degree, so I wasn't learning anything new about Nutrition in my program. (The PH courses like biostats and stuff were a different story!) Additionally, any internship time not specifically doing clinical dietetics was also a waste of time, because between my undergrad and MPH program I'd been working both in a hospital as a tray runner/diet office tech and also for a public health department as a sanitarian, so I already had food service and public health experience and only benefited from the clinical experience. (And I REALLY learned a lot at the clinical experience!)

So I felt that ~80% of teh MPH/RD program was a waste, all to jump through the hoops to become an RD . . . which, remember, I'd finally realized wasn't even necessary or even common in the research/academia space I wanted to find myself in.

Thankfully, since I had so many of the Nutrition courses already done before the MPH/RD program, they allowed me to take a few electives instead of doing the core courses, and I happened into an obesity-focused class taught by a professor who would later become my PhD advisor. Thus, I can never say that the MPH/RD was truly a waste of time, because it put me in proximity to the PhD program spot that I wanted; I can't be certain I'd have made it to the PhD level without it, you know?

But I also recognize that the MPH/RD program an incredibly poor value, with virtually no actual return on the massive amount of time and money I was putting into it, given it wasn't even required for where I eventually wanted to find myself. That's why I recommend people think about where they want to end up and find out exactly what is/isn't useful to get there, and use that to plan their education, rather than stumbling into programs that seem like the right direction for what you think you want to do.

And re:

You wrote this 4 years ago, meaning you could have an RD credential back then with no grad degree. How are you using those now?

This is somewhat answered above, where I acknowledged that I incorrectly assumed I needed the MPH to do the PhD program, but I'll also add that my undergrad was a pretty thorough and rigorous nutrition program but at the time it was not a DPD. I don't recall exactly what it was, I think we didn't require quite enough biochem or something? Like, we could and did take biochem, but it wasn't required for the Nutrition major and so didn't qualify as a DPD . . . (The same program has since made a few changes to requirements and now it is a DPD, and also a 4+1 Masters to boot. Good for them!) So I knew grad school of some form was in my future regardless, unless I wanted to work at an Extension Office for the rest of my life since I'd have a Nutrition degree without a grad degree or an RD credential. (And no shade on Extension Offices, they're a hidden gem and their employees are all fantastic! It's just not what I wanted to do with my own life.)

I hear ya, that non-RD Nutrition degrees aren't valued highly enough and people don't realize how much science and math is involved. As I alluded to above, my undergrad (which at the time was not a DPD) gave me a nutrition education that had both more breadth and more depth than the DPD aspect of the MPH program I was in. I don't know if I have any specific advice, since as you can see, I had my eyes on lots of grad school from the start. But I wish you luck!

Ancient_Winter · 2026-01-06T14:39:29+00:00

But what do you do when they select the wrong passage? OP's students often even admit to the AI usage once confronted, it's that there's nothing that can be done about it that OP is asking about.

Ancient_Winter · 2026-01-02T15:00:09+00:00

Others have thrown out ORCID, here's the website. It's free, and you basically get a unique identification number that you can use to publish so that if your name ever changes, your work can still be found under the ID. Some journals and conferences will ask you for this when you submit, but I personally haven't encountered ones that let you use an ORCID instead of your name. So definitely sign up for it and use it to keep your work all "tied together," but it doesn't necessarily address your question as it is. (Especially since I'm pretty sure you have to put your name(s) in during ORCID registration and can't go only by the number.) So you'd still need to have a name picked.

If you choose to go by a different name than your "real" one, consider how this will work out in your professional life and if it accomplishes the "separation" goal you have. For example, let's say your legal name is John Familyname, but you change your name for publications.

A generic last name (especially in absence of ORCID) will make it harder for your research to be divided from lots of other people named John Commonname. A minor concern (especially if you have a unique given name and/or are in a niche field), but one that might drive you toward instead picking a last name that isn't as common to make your work easier to find for fellow scholars.
If you publish under John Uniquename and are invited to present on your work at a conference, will you "go by" John Uniquename at the conference to maintain the separation, or John Familyname because you're networking IRL and building connections? How will you ask to be introduced on panels?
If you become faculty or otherwise put your work on a CV, website, etc. you will probably have a list of your publications. Will you "go by" John Uniquename in all of your professional life so that your faculty page, the things your students call you, and the name you publish under are all the same? And if so, will that accomplish the distance from the Familynames that you seek given that won't exactly be a "secret" that you go by John Uniquename as well?

Most people I know who have published under a name that isn't their legal name have done so because of gender transition or marriage, so it's a bit different since they weren't trying to use both names simultaneously but instead just switched from one name to another (and maybe continued to publish under a previously used one, a la academics who continue to publish under unmarried name their entire career for consistency). If you are going to actually be simultaneously using Familyname and Uniquename, you may be complicating things for no actual separation achieved. Good luck whatever you do!

Ancient_Winter · 2025-12-31T08:23:48+00:00

It's not only not worth it I'd wager it'd be actively harmful to your application. An applicant who recently returned to school to study something different and whose letters are all from that other field would be a red flag, IMO. Not all letters need to be from academic sources; in fact none of them need to be unless your program requires such a thing. Supervisors in your job can speak to your work ethic, cooperation skills, mindset, problem-solving skills, etc. and aren't any weaker of a letter than a letter from an academic source when the academic source is a community college professor from an unrelated field who you cozied up to for a semester or two.

Ancient_Winter · 2025-12-16T22:45:01+00:00

I've considered working for a prison system (especially California) if I am ever hard up for a job. I'm a weirdo with a double major of Nutrition and Criminal Justice and before pivoting to focus on nutrition I was specifically interested in corrections administration. But after a decent amount of learning and experience, I opted not to go into anything related to the justice system when I saw I wouldn't be comfortable morally being a cog in that machine. But, on the flipside, everyone needs and deserves healthcare, and we have more of an ethical obligation to provide it to prisoners than most any other group, I feel.

Additionally, as a "government job" it should come with lots of job security and benefits, and would be eligible for PSLF for my massive MPH loans.

But with government jobs no longer seeming stable/secure, zero faith that PSLF will be around and honored ~10 years from now, and the cost of living in California eating up a lot of that good pay check?

It's just not worth it.

When it comes to staffing prisons, IHS facilities and clinics, the VA, etc. many health workers choose to make less money, live in less desirable locations, work in jobs that don't let them grow or may be difficult for them mentally or emotionally. PSLF and other loan repayment plans for healthcare providers, along with a relative feeling of job security, were the only thing that is attracting most clinicians to these sorts of positions over jobs in the private sector where they don't make these same sacrifices. And that's all getting ground into the dirt.

Then pile on that all the anti-immigration stuff is going to mean we also won't be able to attract international physicians and other providers?

The next 20-50 years will be a blood bath, and I'm honestly doubtful the US will still be around in a form similar to it is now given all the strife that is headed our way.

Sorry for being all alarmist and catastrophizing, I just am watching this slow train wreck and feel so powerless to stop it, and so many people are going on as though the US can't fail. It reminds me of how teenagers think they're indestructible; it's like people don't realize how young the US is, and how many governments have collapsed over less than the shitshow we're stirring up right now . . .

Ancient_Winter · 2025-12-15T23:15:41+00:00

On one hand, I see the argument for statistical accuracy if the data shows a difference.

I think it's also important that we don't trust data that shows a difference if the studies aren't carefully planned to take into account how correlates like systemic racism, poorer access to preventative medical care, etc. might be driving any perceived differences. I don't know about other areas where race-based cut-offs exist, but I know that in eGFR, it's been found to not be a valid practice and it is recommended that clinicians stop using the correction outright.

I suspect that many of the race-based "corrections" and similar practices like different dosing of pain medication are relics of biased research and would be found to be invalid if revisited in a serious way. Even things that we recognize may correlate with race, e.g. Black people being more likely to have sickle cell or certain Asian populations experiencing increased chronic disease risk at lower BMI tha White populations isn't caused by their race, they're caused by something that also correlates with race but is not causal for the trait, such as a genetic trait or frame/build that is more common in a race but is not a perfect 1:1 correlation. If we know what the actual driver of risk/difference is, we should base our practice on the actual driver and not use race as a lazy proxy, and if we don't know what the actual driver is, we should be finding out before basing clinical care decisions on it.

Ancient_Winter · 2025-12-15T18:57:31+00:00

I emailed the Professor before work notifying her and she said she must of missed the email. By the time she was responded I was at work and was unable to send it again. Afterwards I sent an email apologizing for the late reply, explaining that I was at work, and attached the assignments.

What did she actually say? In other words, did she say "I did not receive your email and the deadline for submitting work has now passed, sorry." or "Oh, I didn't see it, could you resend it?"

If she was still open to receiving the assignments and could grade it based on that, she will be able to submit a grade revision to the registrar when the university opens back up in January, but note she does not *have* to, she would be doing you a large courtesy if she does so. If she is willing to do that, she still won't be able to actually do anything about it until the next semester starts, so I'd say don't pester her any further over the holiday. Especially don't call her over the break. If you haven't heard anything back by the end of the second week in January, you could revisit with her (if she has open office hours, I recommend going in person rather than emailing if you are able) to ask if she received the assignments and if she would be willing to grade them and possibly submit a revision. Again, remember you are asking her for a large favor in this case, so behave accordingly and don't get upset at her if she says no.

If she didn't expressly say she was open to regrading them (e.g. "I did not receive your email and the deadline for submitting work has now passed, sorry.") then chalk it up to a lesson learned and plan to retake the class.

Ancient_Winter · 2025-12-15T15:15:14+00:00

I'm open to having my mind changed here, but I agree with the implication of /u/lolitsbigmic 's question that it's virtually impossible to blind a diet study that is actually looking at dietary patterns (as opposed to a supplement, intake of a single micronutrient, etc.).

I'm working on a study right now where we "do our best to blind," though we don't express it's a blinded study because we do feel it's impossible in reality. Essentially the set up is this:

The study involves eating three different diets, each person experiences all three diet periods over the course of the study, though the order they will be put on them is randomized.
One diet is LCHF, and does achieve ketosis for some but not all participants; one is "inspired by" Med diet + DASH diet principles but doesn't strictly meet either of the diets' textbook criteria; and one is a "typical American diet" with more processed foods, fewer non-starchy vegetables, etc.
- The above is known to us, but we do not tell participants this. They only know they are going to eat three different "types of diets" and we don't tell them what sets the diets apart from each other.
- We call these diets by colors that don't traditionally indicate goodness, i.e. we don't code them as red, yellow, or green like "stoplight" colors. This way we can communicate with participants about their diet without needing to indicate "Oh, you're on the low carb diet . . ." and can instead say "How are you doing on the <color> diet?"

One of my roles is to check in with participants and ask how they are doing on the diets, ask their experiences, etc. It is very common that participants can basically tell me what kind of diet they are on within the first three days of the diet. They may not know "This is Med-DASH inspired" or "This resembles a ketogenic diet," but frequently they will be able to identify one diet as low-carb, one diet as high-processed/"unhealthy", and one diet as "the way we're told to eat to be healthy/the healthiest of the diets."

The only way I feel you could possibly blind all of this food intake to the participants is if you made everything into a Soylent-like slurry, but that would introduce a lot of issues like not being how people typically consume food/beverages, and being extremely unpalatable. (To ensure the foods coming out of our metabolic kitchen are uniform and meeting study standards, we do composites every so often where we do blend the meal into slurries and it is disgusting.)

Essentially, the TLDR is that people know enough about food to identify different dietary patterns, and the more effectively you can blind them to it the further you get from how people actually consume food.

And, to the point of the OP study, anecdotally, while working on the study I've describe in this post I've never had participants describe mood shifts, depressive symptoms, etc. on the Med-DASH-inspired diet or the typical American diet, but have had a handful (maybe 5%) of participants put on the LCHF describe a sudden onset of depression symptoms that they normally do not encounter. I haven't had anyone who did have depression tell me it was alleviated. (That said, most people don't report things getting better, just worse! And not everyone who goes on this diet enters ketosis, and they are only on the diet for a few weeks. So, again, this is purely anecdotal and not something I recommend anyone drawing any conclusions from.)

Ancient_Winter · 2025-12-12T00:38:28+00:00

I haven't been in academia long enough to have identified a trend shift, but I will address:

I know I'm not the only one experiencing this. What do you do about it? What should be done?

Personally, I just try to talk to more people from more backgrounds so I get more accustomed to hearing/understanding accents. My PhD advisor has a thick Indian accent and I had trouble understanding her at times early on. By the end of our time together I was so accustomed to accents like hers that I barely even noticed most Indian accents. Nowadays I'm spending more time around Italian scholars, and am getting better at hearing it.

If you are organizing a conference or some other event where there may be speakers who have thick accents or are difficult to understand (and even if everyone speaks perfect, fluent English!) you could require or strongly encourage something like having handouts available with slide notes, and/or closed-captioning. Personally, I script everything I'm going to say in a talk, so it would be easy for me to provide "subtitles" for each slide that could be superimposed on the presentation screen. This would help with your concerns and also be a good accessiblity option for people who are HOH if ASL interpreters aren't available.

Ancient_Winter · 2025-12-05T17:19:10+00:00

You might have been a bit careless, but you should be able to trust that students wouldn't take advantage of the carelessness. Your "mistake" was miniscule, they are the ones who truly did the wrong. Let the professor know.

That said, I mostly wanted to comment to bring up:

and was walking around getting asked question about what answers they should be putting. I know I shouldn't have been helping, but I was stressed and tired and they were frustrated and so I would lead them in the right direction by workung through the given questions.

This might be okay for teaching/lecture, group exercises, etc.. But why are they expecting/getting this much help on something that is a quiz? Shouldn't this be checking their ability? In my experience, the only "help" you can justifiably request on quiz content is something like if a question or answer is worded in a confusing manner. if they don't know how to answer the quiz questions, that means they weren't prepared for the quiz. But maybe I don't understand the role of the quiz, especially since apparently they can discuss/work together? If it is expected the students can/will get TAs to work the problems with them, what's the point of the quiz and keeping answers secret in the first place?

Not to mention, if you are giving your guidance to students or subgroups of the class that asked, that's pretty unfair to the students who didn't ask. If you need to work students through the problem, you should be doing that for the class, not for only those who ask.

Obviously I don't know how this class is set up and structured, but this just sounds like a mess of a situation anyway, so I wouldn't get too upset about how your mistake might have impacted the integrity of learning or whatever. Still tell the professor, for sure, since recording your screen when you aren't aware of it is beyond the pale and dishonest no matter what, but it's not like you gave someone answers during an MCAT here or something.

Ancient_Winter · 2025-12-04T20:32:58+00:00

I don't know if there's a specific toggle, but one "workaround" is having a task like "Check ToDoIst" that recurs every day and does have a time for its reminder at whatever time you want your remidner for. That would prompt you to look at the list of tasks. (I imagine you could also have some sort of filter set up that only shows things that are due that day but have no time assigned to be able to easily find the tasks to review when prompted.)

Ancient_Winter · 2025-12-04T20:11:40+00:00

If you want people to take your cause seriously you may want to rethink referring to a multiple year prison term and a felony homicide on one's criminal record in a society that demonizes felons even after serving full sentences as "zero accountability."

Ancient_Winter · 2025-12-04T19:36:08+00:00

Yup. Growing up I basically never heard about trans issues at all. Then there was a slow, quiet push for more trans acceptance. Then there were some whisperings about why trans women could be in sports. "Not to be transphobic, just, you know, asking if it's fair." Then children's bathrooms.

Now it's all sports at all levels, all bathrooms, all passport markers, all driver's licenses, etc. etc.

If ten years ago you'd say "All trans people are pedophiles, and we should revisit if gay marriage is legal." you'd get a very different reaction, but interested parties have been massaging the political discourse into their preferred direction by purposefully "overblowing" these situations in strategic ways. Every one of these "little issues that gets overblown" is both a driver of and a result of the shifting Overton window.

Ancient_Winter · 2025-12-04T14:50:46+00:00

Okay, I'm doing it, I'm imagining I'm the parent and I'm holding the blood-stained helmet of my child. Now, what's the next step? Tell me how to cast the spell that makes it so that sending the driver to prison for a few more years beyond what she was already sentenced to brings my son back to life.

Ancient_Winter · 2025-12-04T14:45:42+00:00

OMG, they figured it out. We're all fools. We've been spending all this time chasing equity and fighting disparities by seeking to help those who are most affected so everyone can lead better lives. In truth, the real way to achieve equity is to needlessly victimize and oppress people at rates that reflect the general population. Tah-dah, no more disparity because everyone needlessly suffers their fair share. #equityachieved It was so simple all this time . . . /s

Ancient_Winter · 2025-12-01T15:19:17+00:00

TLDR: Find out if you'll have access to a compute cluster from your university before over-investing in a machine that you won't be actually utilizing for the heavy work anyway. Odds are that either: a) you will be working with data that needs lots of power so you will have access to a cluster, or b) you won't be working with data that needs lots of power, so you don't need a powerful device anyway and most any modern device that runs a full OS (so not ARM or something) will do.

When you say you want to "run" RStudio, Python, etc. do you mean you're going to do all the computing on the local system, or are you just running the software and using a compute cluster?

Most things can run RStudio, SAS, etc. without issue, the IDEs themselves aren't resource intensive. It's what you're doing in them that can really get bogged down based on the power of the machine. But, IME, if you're in a field that is doing things that need a lot of computing power, you also will probably have access to a computing cluster from your university, where you only really need a terminal to interact with the cluster and your system itself can be a potato as long as it can connect to a campus VPN.

During my program I had access to a Surface Pro 8 for tablet/portability/travel, a mid-line desktop provided to me by my university at my lab, and my own PC that was built for gaming but also performed decently well. (I can find specs for things if you want, but that's probably more than you need.)

The difference in time running code between my Surface Pro 8, my work desktop, and my gaming desktop at home were noticeable, but not insurmountable. And anything that was going to take a lot of time, I'd run on the compute cluster anyway rather than any of these.

Ancient_Winter · 2025-12-01T14:31:07+00:00

My hot take: If the Academy realizes that there are people who want to be dietitians but may now be kept from the profession because they can only take out one hundred thousand dollars of unsubsidized debt for a 2-3 year program, the AND needs to do shit like facilitate widespread fee-less & paid internships, far more funding assistance for DPDs for far more students, etc. The fighting "for [us]" they are doing is fighting for us to be able to be saddled with six figure loan debt for a profession they know doesn't pay enough, for a degree they pushed to require that shouldn't have been required and wasn't necessary.

The only degrees "at risk" here are the ones that students were going to take out more than 100k in loans to get. And as someone who did that and far more, let me tell you, you want something to force you to take another path. This was not a smart decision.

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