On my predictions for where philosophy publishing will be in 5 years
To say I've been having a crisis of confidence in my research would be a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much. A few weeks after my buddy and I got a paper accepted at a top-tier journal (a paper we had been trying to place for over a year and half), one might think I would be enamored with philosophy journal publishing right now. After all, they reward the true and the good (me!) with fancy pubs.
But, instead, I can't help but think we're sort of at the tail end of the current journal system as we know it, at least in philosophy. Seeing all the mathematicians thinking about the future of their field in light of OpenAI - uh, bulldozing in and burning a bunch of things down and yelling about how great they are and how mathematics is over bro - has me in a similarly reflective mood. And it's hard for me to avoid the conclusion that philosophy publishing five years from now is going to look very different (and worse) than it does right now. (Who knew that was even possible.)
As a person who has to keep up with the latest frontier AI models for my work, I am aware of just how good they are. Speaking of that paper my buddy and I just placed, at one point in the process we were having a hard time with a particularly prickly reviewer. We asked one of the more advanced models to take a look at our materials and the review, and make suggestions for what we could improve. Interestingly, at the micro level, it still made a ton of mistakes that made some of its recommendations borderline unintelligible to an expert reader. But it did really help us with big picture stuff! Including pointing out a sub-part of the reviewer's report that we had said we were going to address but had forgotten to. That's, to put it in technical terms, kinda cool, and also really scary.
It's also why I think the kind of middle-of-the-road philosophy paper is going to be a trivial thing for someone with graduate training in philosophy to produce in five years. Right now, the vast majority of my non-submission-related research time is spent trying to get from "hey, I had this idea about a paper I could write" to "I feel I can actually write this paper in roughly this form." Right now, it takes me a couple months of occasional work on something to get between those two points. But, given how good some of these frontier LLMs are getting, I bet, even now, I could cross that gap in an afternoon or two. (The fact that I choose not to do so is because I simply have a Love of the Game for Publishing in Phil Review.) And, while it is of course possible that the Butlerian Jihad will finally happen, or that widespread LLM use will degrade philosophical expertise in the rising generation to the point where they can't even do this kind of guided editing with an LLM, frankly, I doubt it.
That means that, in five years, there are going to be many, many, many more papers that could make it into a journal like Synthese than there are now. Such journals (as well as their fancier kin) will be absolutely inundated with pretty good (not great, but pretty good) philosophy papers. And it's hard to see how the current system can adapt to deal with this deluge. The most obvious way of doing it is using LLMs as reviewers themselves. This strikes me, though, as significantly too much scholarly deferral, and any journal who does this will pretty quickly dilute themselves out of the realm of respectable journal and into so much predatory nonsense. More likely, I think, is that papers will just take years and years to get published, while a corresponding backlog of ok-but-not-great papers balloons on preprint servers. In neither case do I see how the philosophy paper can continue to play the role of both status conferrer and bearer of new knowledge that it currently does.
Of course, not all of the different splintered subcommunities we have in philosophy will be hit equally by this. It will be entirely possible for someone to write papers using their brain and to put them up on various preprint servers. They will also, I think, be able to credibly signal in various ways that they are, in fact, avoiding The Machine and using the machine in the noggin to do so. If people continue to hate AI the way they are rapidly starting to hate AI, it strikes me that, for at least some people, this will be a way to generate a winning strategy in the philosophy status game, at least in the medium term.
Additionally, some of our top journals in our field right now mostly function as a kind of in-network pass-around game where people and their buddies keep each other afloat by reviewing and accepting each others' papers. Anyone who sees how, in a field where most papers are under review for like a year and a half, some people can have like 8 pubs a year (all in top 10 journals) will immediately grok this mechanism. I imagine such networks will only grow in the next five years, and that these will intersect with the I-did-it-my-brain prestige networks speculated about in the previous paragraph. All of this is, I think, mostly insulated from wider market forces in the prestige hierarchy of philosophy, just as the children of rich kids will be mostly insulated from the firehose of garbage that will be the average public school kid's experience of education in the AI age.
But (and this is something that I think we don't recognize enough): most hiring in philosophy, even in research-active R1 philosophy, happens at the level of the Synthese paper, not the Phil Review paper. We are rapidly hurtling towards a time where that level of paper will be, to not put too fine a point on it, meaningless, at least from a status perspective.
Of course, it won't be meaningless from what you might think is the more important perspective: the accumulation of philosophical knowledge. The thing about the average Synthese paper is that, in virtue of being kinda mid but still pretty good, it often really does move philosophy along. (In fact, in my experience at least, the average Synthese paper, in virtue of not trying to swing its dick around, actually usually helps me more than the average BDE-but-actually-boring top-top-tier paper.) So, the thought might go: how could having more knowledge of the lay of the land of philosophy be a bad thing?
But this is where the things the mathematicians have been saying come back forcefully for me. The point is not to just have a bunch of papers out there that no one reads or talks about but that are sound and do contain knowledge. The point is for human beings to come together in communities of inquiry and do philosophy together. The journal article (grafted from administrative evaluations of scientists and hoisted onto us basically without our consent) was always a weird way to build community. But at least it was a way to build community. I have no idea what that community looks like in the age of firehosed AI-generated philosophy papers of even pretty-good quality, and I suspect, as has been the case for all things that AI touches, the answer is: there will be no community at all.
Someone with a less depressive and anxious nature than me might see this as a golden opportunity. For the Georgi Gardiners of the world, this is an opportunity to radically reimagine what doing philosophy amongst a community of scholars really means. We might have a hard time explaining to administrators how to attach numbers to that so they can look all Objective and Scientific, but, presumably, there ARE ways to do that. And, once we figure those out, we'll be free of the shackles of a form that has always been kinda oddly suited to us as a community anyway.
Or, maybe not. Maybe, instead, we will do the natural thing and fracture. We will Log Off and retreat to our own in-person intellectual and scholarly communities (damaged though those have been by the last 20 years of, y'know, everything). Of course, it will be hard (not impossible!) to hold those together if they are purely research-focused, since research will just not matter nearly as much as it used to. Naturally, the thing we will retreat to is teaching, particularly (for those of us who can do it) in-person, small-class teaching where we might actually reasonably hope to make a difference in how real, flesh-and-blood people think and reason about the world.
Of course, these are precisely the classes that brain-rotted administrators are looking to get rid of and replace with 900-seat lectures with AI TAs for all.
And so now, we are far enough down in the post (and at a place where my department head and dean are unlikely to look) that I can say: y'know, if a nice liberal arts college wants to hire me to teach small classes and talk about philosophy in community with a bunch of smart people, I would kinda be down with that! Especially since the state I currently teach in has gutted tenure protections while requiring me to teach anti-feminist material in units on feminism in science in the name of "intellectual diversity."
Analytic philosophy forever. Enjoy the Food Fight.