A Theoretical Physics PhD Student on How AI Is Changing Academic Learning and Collaboration

Summary

In this first-person essay, a theoretical physics PhD student recounts how AI changed her experience of studying and conducting research. At Oxford in late 2024 and early 2025, she initially found ChatGPT unreliable for scattering-amplitude and quantum-field-theory questions, while classmates increasingly used it to complete problem sets. Her view changed when she had roughly six weeks to prepare for several MSc examinations: by giving ChatGPT small sections of notes, she used it to re-explain difficult concepts, supply concrete examples, and make advanced material more accessible. She says this helped her learn general relativity, cosmology, and geophysical fluid dynamics from scratch and pass closed-book exams, although she still did the exam work herself. At Harvard, she used AI more cautiously for finding background literature, interpreting papers, and patching a limited piece of Mathematica code, while doing little of the conceptual work on her first research project. She also acknowledges the significance of an OpenAI internal model contributing to a proof related to celestial holography, but argues that human researchers supplied much of the conceptual direction and that physics involves more than formal deduction. As AI use became common among her peers, she says conversations, brainstorming, and coding were increasingly redirected to chatbots, which often produced confident but unusable or incorrect material. The essay argues that AI can be a valuable explanatory tool, but cannot replace mentors, peers, or the reciprocal debate through which students learn to judge ideas. In her view, the deeper problem is an academic culture already rewarding speed, publication volume, status, and performance; chatbots amplify that culture by encouraging isolation and by validating users without reliably challenging them. She concludes that the risk is not simply job displacement, but the loss of the human community and shared pursuit of understanding that make scientific work meaningful.