Controversy over USA AI conference as Australian academics react
The shockwaves of a controversial conference at a prestigious US university have reached Australia, as academics hit back at the event for crossing a ‘sacred line’.
A controversial conference at a prestigious American university has faced worldwide backlash as Australian academics join the debate about the “world first” event.
Stanford University researchers will host the Agents4Science 2025 conference on Wednesday, promising a “world first” event where AI will both author and review academic research papers.
Australian academics have criticised the automation of the “deeply human” activity of research conferences as fear spreads AI could replace academia entirely.
Others have praised the bold move for tackling AI head on and challenging the academic community to rethink the rising dominance of AI.
The organisers claim the conference is a “transparent sandbox” to explore and test the capabilities of AI.
University of Sydney senior lecturer Dr Raffaele Ciriello was not amused by the trial.
“The idea of a research conference where both the authors and the reviewers are artificial intelligence systems is, at best, an amusing curiosity and, at worst, an unfunny parody of what science is meant to be,” Dr Ciriello said.
“There is, of course, a legitimate discussion to be had about how AI tools can assist scientists in analysing data, visualising results, or improving reproducibility.
“But a conference built fully on AI-generated research reviewed by AI reviewers embodies a dangerous kind of technocratic self-parody.
“It reflects an ideology of techno-utilitarianism, in which efficiency and automation are celebrated even when they strip away the very human elements that make science legitimate.”
La Trobe University Professor Daswin De Silva described the event as “poorly motivated” and a threat to the “deeply human activities of peer-reviewed research, knowledge gain, discussion, collaboration, and networking”.
University of NSW researcher Professor Hussein Abbass said he was concerned the event crossed “a sacred line”.
“There is a sacred line I do not cross; the line that distinguishes humans from machines; academic authorship is only meaningful for humans, not AI.”
Praise for the bold move among Australian academics was scarce.
Flinders University researcher professor David Powers described it as an “interesting experiment”, noting the comparatively low acceptance rate of papers at the conference.
“Agents4Science 2025 will provide an opportunity to see papers that are openly AI-written and openly AI-reviewed, and analyse this data to inform the community’s efforts to ensuring research integrity and optimised processing in our new AI-driven age,” professor Powers said.
“This looks like being an interesting and useful dataset for analysis to help us understand the use of AI in the research world.”
University of Sydney researcher Dr Armin Chitizadeh described the event as “an important step” which would allow academics to further assess the capabilities of AI.
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Originally published as Controversy over USA AI conference as Australian academics react
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