What is Left for Us? Second Scholarship Against the Degradation of Research by AI

We argue that generative AI can degrade research by eroding the very practices through which scholarly judgement is formed and academic trust is built. As constitutive conditions for the production and validation of knowledge, these practices cannot be reduced to the final outputs of research, which is what AI so effectively simulate. Accordingly, when researchers delegate central tasks of inquiry to systems like Large Language Models (LLMs), they may stop enacting these practices and, with them, lose access to the formation they provide. An individual research output generated by AI may even appear improved but the researcher behind it fails to develop. Against this risk, merely keeping humans "in the loop" as prompters or quality-checkers of AI outputs is insufficient to preserve research as a site of intellectual formation. What is needed instead is a renewed commitment to research as a lived practice in which judgement is formed gradually, often through frictions, and participation in a scholarly community. We defend it because it rests on four sources and warrants of research that cannot be automated: tacit knowledge, personal commitment, socialisation, and deep reading. This practice enacts what we call ‘second scholarship’, by which we understand the re-appropriation of scholarly craft, chosen out of a critical experience of what generative AI can and cannot do. What cannot and should not be delegated becomes what research communities must value and answer for. This is what is left for us.