research-note
Synthetic Scholarship
When nobody can read the literature
Imagine a research system capable of producing credible papers faster than a discipline can read them.
Synthetic Scholarship explores this as an institutional problem. Automated researchers generate hypotheses, analyses, literature reviews and articles; automated reviewers evaluate them; university systems count the outputs. Human researchers increasingly encounter scholarship through machine summaries of machine-produced work.
The fiction is intentionally excessive, but only in scale. Its question is simple: if production ceases to be scarce, does scholarly value migrate from writing and discovery towards selection, attention and judgement?
Centre for Speculative AI · Speculative material