Breaking Out of the Jar

Anya Workman is a Hastings Post-baccalaureate Fellow in AI and Humanity. She graduated from Bowdoin in 2025 with a degree in Anthropology and Digital & Computational Studies, and a minor in Music. She is interested in the human side of emerging digital technologies, including how people understand, relate to, and are impacted by them. 

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There are those who believe that increasingly capable generative AI spells the end of academic papers. As someone applying to PhD programs, considering life as an academic, and who loves writing, I have a vested interest in this not being the future. I’m only at the margins of the academic world, and I have so much to learn, but I’d like to offer a suggestion based on my observations. Instead of eliminating academic papers, what if we rethink them? 

At least in my experience, many disciplines teach us to remove ourselves from our writing. “I argue” turns into “this paper argues.” “I” becomes “the author.” It’s as if by writing an academic paper, we transform into something other than ourselves. We become the Researcher. In this process of transformation, who we are outside of research is abstracted away. We are only the books we read, the analyses we perform, the results we get. The strange entity that is the Researcher exists in a vacuum, just a brain in a jar on a dusty shelf. 

This is eerily close to how we often imagine AI: disembodied intelligence divorced from human experience. And when large language models (LLMs) can write convincing, high-level papers (if you don’t think they can today, they’re only getting better), we need to break out of the jar. What sets your paper apart is that it was written by you, with your voice, your experiences, your way of thinking, your specific understanding of the world and how your work fits into it. An LLM cannot replace that.

These academic writing conventions exist, and they exist for specific reasons. But that doesn’t mean they’re the best for the current moment. The good news is that the Researcher is made up. We aren’t, and have never been, brains in jars. Sometimes we just like to pretend otherwise. Researchers are people too. People first (groundbreaking observation, I know). 

One thing I love about anthropology is that it recognizes that you and everything you bring with you matter in your work. Your identities (positionality) impact your research, and part of your job is to continuously reflect on what that impact is (reflexivity). This makes space for much more honest, creative, and interesting ways of presenting ideas. I don’t know what this looks like in, say, a biology paper. I’m not a biologist. But I imagine we can figure something out if we learn from one another across disciplines. 

This would not be an effortless transition. It’s not an easy way out or a diminution of rigor. Like the conventions we’ve been taught since middle school, it would require training, a rewiring of how we think about research and academic writing. It would require not only acknowledging the relationship between you and whatever you’re studying, but the ability to navigate that relationship in meaningful ways. 

Beyond AI, maybe this is what academia needs. It’s always been true that researchers and research cannot be removed from the larger world. Our perspectives and values don’t contaminate our writing; they inform it. And when we couch our views in language of objectivity, we risk presenting our own situated understandings as universal at best or avoiding accountability at worst. Maybe we should take this moment to reemphasize what makes our research and papers irreplaceable: our humanity. Perhaps we needed a push to open our minds to new possibilities.