Should Researchers Write Papers for AI Instead of People?

This May, 37 researchers from roughly two dozen top universities and tech companies published a paper on ArXiv, arguing that scientists should stop writing papers. Why? Because artificial intelligence needs a different format, and AI’s needs, they say, should be the priority. “AI agents are becoming first-class participants in research workflows, not tools that assist humans but autonomous contributors that read, reproduce, and extend scientific work. That transition demands infrastructure built around agents from the start,” the authors write in the provocative article, titled “The Last Human-Written Paper .” The paper proposes a replacement, called an “Agent-Native Research Artifact” (ARA), that presents work in a format AI agents can use efficiently. (As an example, the paper itself is online in ARA form.) Jiachen Liu co-founded the Agent Native Research Lab in May. Jiachen Liu The growth of AI tools in the research process is not without its critics, and scientists’…