Please commit more blatant academic fraud
There&#x27;s another solution: give up on academia.<p>The model of academia works well when some part of society is willing to fund researchers spending time on open-ended basic research, even if it produces no results. Saying &quot;Don&#x27;t engage in unethical behavior&quot; is well and good, but if the incentives are towards unethical behavior, you shouldn&#x27;t expect very much.<p>Academic funding and employment is very closely linked to the number of published papers. The article says that a grad student who publishes three papers a year is a professor&#x27;s dream - but on reflection, it should be clear that this is not because three papers a year is necessarily good science, it&#x27;s just a good metric. The professor&#x27;s lab looks good for publishing so much, the professor can ask for more funding from grant agencies, and the student is likely to get a good faculty job which reflects well on the professor.<p>So it&#x27;s extraordinarily difficult to stay in the field, have a well-funded lab, hire enough grad students, and get tenure if you&#x27;re optimizing for the quality of your science over the number of publications. The &quot;publish or perish&quot; culture (literally, in at least one case, it seems) isn&#x27;t driven by the practitioners; it&#x27;s driven by the requirements of getting grants and getting academic jobs in an increasingly competitive market.<p>Now in some fields you do need the facilities from a university to do your research, but for CS in general - and especially for AI - you&#x27;ll be just fine in industry. All you need is a pile of cloud VMs, and industry can get you that. Perhaps you also need interesting data and real-world problems; industry can get you that too.<p>Society today underfunds academia and overfunds industry. You, the individual researcher, are not going to be able to fix this. Go where the incentives are better aligned for you.<p>(And if you&#x27;re a Ph.D. student who sees no future in your life after being complicit in fraud, please, please reach out to industry. Your prior publications are nowhere near as high-stakes as in an academic job; you can contact the journal, get it retracted, drop out of the program, and have a great life ahead of you. What saddens me is that the student who allegedly took his own life was probably so deeply surrounded by academia that he didn&#x27;t know there&#x27;s a world who won&#x27;t judge him for having one fewer paper on his CV and will even look on him <i>positively</i> for reporting fraud and getting his advisor into career trouble.)<p>---<p>That said, my argument is undermined a bit because the papers OP denounces have coauthors in industry. So I don&#x27;t have an answer for why those coauthors went along with it.