Ask HN: Is using AI tooling for a PhD literature review dishonest?

I'm a professor of computer science, and I use AI to conduct literature reviews all the time. It's actually one of the handful of things that AI really excels at. So really, I think I would be more inclined to teach students how to do use AI effectively rather than discourage it. I know I would have loved to have it when I was working on my PhD, and I haven't authored a paper in the past 2 years that did not include help from LLMs.

I tend to use Notebook LM to gather and analyze papers, then I synthesize some notes, outline the ideas and prompt it to give citations to the outline. Then I take that and write my literature review narrative, which I then hand over to claud for proofreading.

End to end, the process is much faster than back when I did it manually. Just like typesetting a paper in latex is faster than the hot metal process of 50 years ago. The bottom line for me is this: You should always use every tool at your disposal when doing real work, and research is real work.

If you have mapped the research space and understand it very well then what does it matter how you got there?

For example when I was doing my master's degree in the UK, I realised my research topic had about 10 people around the world working on similar problems and I had read all of their papers.

I could trace the early research and seminal works in the field from the 1960s until now and knew by name (and often email correspondence) the 10 or so researchers working in the hyper-niche space.

If you can get to some kind of intimate understanding about your body of research the method is not really relevant. But take the LLM away can you still hold a conversation with an expert? LLM cannot read the papers for you.

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