Post 12: What is the Relationship Between Academia, AI, and the Oscars? 😶
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Louis Mayer was a businessman and the founder of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), famous for organizing the Oscars. The Oscar was created during a time when labor unions were fighting for better working conditions; thus, a group of entrepreneurs like Louis established AMPAS to guarantee labor conditions for a select group of individuals and to make them believe they belonged to an elite, creating a hierarchical structure to prevent further labor protests and pitting them against one another. In fact, in an interview, Louis Mayer stated, “I found that the best way to deal with [filmmakers] was to hang medals on them everywhere. If I could get them trophies and awards, they would kill themselves to produce what I wanted. That’s why the Academy Award was created.”
In today’s scientific landscape, scientists are evaluated based on the number of articles they publish, not by the value of their discoveries, the individuals they help train, or their contributions to public understanding. If you don’t publish, you perish. But it’s not just about publishing; it’s about publishing in “prestigious” journals like Nature, Cell, or Science, which charge over $10,000. This is ironic, considering the very foundation of science is supposed to be sharing information. It’s common to see scientists congratulating each other with particular emphasis when publishing in such journals, thereby creating egos and hierarchies.
In contrast to other scientific fields, computer scientists have historically been considered “rebels” because most share ALL their information and the programs they’ve written to advance more quickly. In fact, large public repositories of scientific papers like arXiv or Sci-Hub were created under this philosophy and have gained popularity thanks to researchin AI.
The publishers behind journals like Nature noticed this trend and wanted a slice of the cake, creating Nature Machine Intelligence, a specialized journal in AI with a publication fee of about $12,000. In response to the establishment of Nature Machine Intelligence, the computer science community called for a boycott, drafting a letter with around 3,600 signatories pledging not to publish, review, or edit for the journal as it goes against computer science philosophy.
In academia, it’s common to see criticisms directed at repositories like arXiv for their “lack of rigor.” It’s also frequent to observe how egos inflate from publishing in a prestigious journal. Thus, it’s as if scientists receive an Oscar for which they paid $10,000.
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