Publishing’s two jobs

There’s a piece on the ergosphere blog worth reading this week about what the author calls the Alice-and-Bob problem. Alice and Bob both produce a PhD research paper. Alice did it the hard way — reading carefully, debugging, getting confused, building real understanding. Bob used AI agents to skip all of that and produced an equivalent-looking output. By the metrics the institution has, they’re interchangeable. In practice, one of them knows something.

The failures are the curriculum…Every hour you spend confused is an hour you spend building the infrastructure inside your own head.

I’ve been arguing for a while that academic publishing is trying to do two jobs at once: expand the frontiers of human knowledge, and certify individuals for hiring, tenure, and promotion. Those jobs have always been in some tension — a paper that gets someone promoted isn’t necessarily a paper that advances a field — but they were compatible enough that nobody had to choose explicitly.

The Alice-and-Bob framing makes that tension concrete. If Bob’s paper passes peer review, he gets the credential. But the knowledge the field gains from his paper is built on a foundation that doesn’t include Bob actually understanding it. That matters when someone tries to build on his work and Bob can’t help them.

I’ve noticed a smaller version of this myself. A presentation built with AI help but without genuine thinking behind it holds together until someone asks a question. Then you find out quickly what you actually know. For a paper, the equivalent moment is the job interview. The science might be perfectly sound — but if Bob can’t talk about why he made the methodological choices he made, the credential stops working.

The urgency is that this isn’t a gradual shift. The volume of AI-assisted submissions is going to overwhelm human-powered editorial systems within the next year or two, and publishers will reach for AI to manage the load. At that point the two-jobs tension becomes unavoidable: the systems processing the inbox won’t be able to tell Alice from Bob either.

Maybe the answer is separate venues: one optimized for credentialing, one for genuine knowledge expansion with review processes designed to assess whether the author actually understands what they found. That’s probably not happening soon. But every publisher is already implicitly choosing which function to optimize for, every time they decide what AI assistance in manuscripts or reviews is acceptable.