Monthly Archives: October 2026

For whom the bells toLLMs

Posted on by
2

‘No Man is an Island’ by John Donne

No man is an island entire of itself; every man 
is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; 
if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe 
is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as 
well as any manner of thy friends or of thine 
own were; any man's death diminishes me, 
because I am involved in mankind. 
And therefore never send to know for whom 
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.

In 2015, I attended a graduate course on data analysis near Montréal, Canada. A senior researcher came to give a lecture, about his career and accomplishments. What could have been inspiring turned into a sad and bitter litany of complaints about how Science had changed and how it was accelerating at a pace that was unsustainable with expectations for scientists to “tweet” and contribute to “blogs” to get traction on their works. The professor, you can imagine them to represent the typical stereotype of a scientist, had had a career in which research manuscripts were typed by hand and sent my post mail; in which his dear wife stayed home with the kids while he worked and came back to a lovely meal; in which correspondance between researchers across the world was much slower and data points were put on grid paper. It made me angry to listen to such a “party pooper” (pardon my bluntness ^^) rain on my parade and turn to gloom a room full of next generation scientists that just wanted to believe that there is a space for them in this world of Academia. It made me feel like he was someone that could not adjust anymore to the novel ways, “time for him to retire” is what I thought…

Fast forward to 2026, and I am wondering what is happening with the publication system in Academia and wondering if this retiring professor was right…

We have known for a while that the publication system in Science is broken. It has turned into this massive capitalist business in which journals churn scientific papers faster and faster every year. The existence of predatory journals and their presence online has exploded; good reviewers that really take the time to evaluate and comment the value of a manuscript are harder to find than ever; scientists across the world are found guilty of cheating their data or performing blatant plagiarism; and the confidence in scientific results is going down down down the drain… And now I wonder if LLMs, Large Language Models, and AI tools, are the nails in the coffin.

Oh they are great, very efficient and quite the help if you have the knowledge to guide them and use them as a support rather than as the main responsible of your scientific content:

  • they can find mistakes in my code that would have taken me minutes to hours to days to fix during my PhD (probably saving me some tears and a great amount of frustration against this one missing comma haha);
  • they can correct my typos and grammar mistakes (once I wrote “pubic” instead of “public”, never again!), you know English is not my first language just like for many other scientists across the world;
  • they can take my ideas and spit out a first draft of a text in mere minutes;
  • they can create the first version of a conceptual figure that I want to add to support my manuscript or presentation.

Oh they are good, sure. Because of this “enhancement” of our capacity, LLMs are accelerating the pace at which we can produce scientific manuscripts. And this amplifies even more the problems of our publication system:

  • Scientists that did not know how to analyze their data are now using LLMs to do that task for them, without reviewing the statistical choices made, the real code performed, and the robustness of the results.
  • Reviewers (let’s all remember this is a pro bono task that we do to ensure the quality of Science) that already did not have (or take) the time to review manuscripts well are now delegating LLMs to do that job, thus giving not so good reviews to already not so good manuscripts.
  • Predatory journals are publishing more shitty papers but they look more polished because of LLMs. Even international journals estimated to publish good quality manuscripts are now outputting works that show the remnants of LLMs and their misuse.
  • And no one reads papers anymore. No need, LLMs will find the important references, and summarize the literature.

So I wonder, if we are producing these papers and books at an ever accelerating pace, with the help of AI tools, then LLMs review these papers, and then it reads the papers for us to summarize the information, for whom am I doing Science anymore? For an AI company to train its own LLMs?

For whom the bell toLLMs? It toLLMs for thee?

Note: Thanks to Jonathan Rondeau-Leclaire for quick feedback including typos and suggestions 🙂

Oh and 2nd note: for those wondering, this post was also written with my own brain, no LLMs used in the process :))

Of the importance of positive connections and friendships in academia (and everywhere else)

Posted on by
Reply

Full disclaimer, this post was written during the summer of 2026 without any help of LLMs. Any sass, grammar mistakes, typos, are my very own ^^

As online living, social media, and AI technology continue to invade our lives, loneliness and disconnection seem to be creeping and gaining grounds. This is most unfortunate because much of our happiness as human beings stems from the shared smiles, from the pleasure of helping others, from sharing a meal with family or friends, or from the quiet moments of doing absolutely nothing (il dolce far niente) with our significant other (or watching LOTR extended version for the 20th time – IFKYK). Those moments are just not happening if we live our life more and more on Facebook (yes I am of that era ^^), Instagram or TikTok (I don’t even know how this works…). By spending so much of our time online, are we forgetting how social interactions and connections work?

In the universe in which I spend most of my time, the academia bubble, I believe that connections are ESSENTIAL. To learn from one another, to improve our work by collaborating, to share the joys and challenges of having no idea what is coming next, to have interesting opportunities, and to face the numerous “no thank you” that we receive, and receive, and receive again… This list could be much longer… Since I became a prof in 2020 (almost 7 years now! but it still feels like yesterday…), I have seen several people in academia struggle with mental health, but I know it is not a phenomenon restricted to our domain. It is widespread and gaining ground, and fast. And my own path has not always been easy (gray hairs are gaining on me ^^), yet my human connections, family, friends, colleagues, have always provided help, support, relief, happiness, in many different instances (professional and personal) of my life.

In the last 15 years I moved around several times across cities and continents. Mostly for my studies and jobs, each time settling in a new place, each time getting opportunities to create new connections yet also going through a lot of loneliness, at least at the beginning of each new move. Through all these experiences, I developed this ability to connect quickly to others, a resilience of sort. In school, at work, in my hobbies, while rock climbing, playing soccer or boardgames, training in CrossFit gyms, going to a concert, watching a hockey game on TV. It took a hand shake, a smile that touches the eyes, a laugh, a quick chat, a bit of curiosity, and I could always find something that would connect me to a new person.

In academia, and just in life in general, how we treat each other is much more important than we realize. It speaks volumes about our character, about our values, about our capacity to listen to others and find a way to create this interpersonal link through a shared interest, experience, value, or challenge. And as we age, opportunities to create these new connections, new friendships usually become more scarce. More importantly, isolation is a hallmark of cognitive decline, often seen in elders and in patients suffering from depression.

Learning to navigate social interactions to foster inter-human connections is not always easy (LOL). We are each our own special snowflake ^^ with different tolerances thresholds and needs, which means we need to be patient, and learn how to live with one another and communicate. Failure to compromise, to perform introspection on our own behaviour, to identify toxicity in ourselves and in our peers’ comments and attitudes is a promise for unhappiness and loneliness. Unfortunately, even with the best intentions as a PI I have met difficult challenges and found that I cannot save everyone from themselves. There are some human skills such as emotional intelligence that fall beyond the scope of academic mentoring and if a colleague or student is pathologically toxic or has mental health issues that require professional support, there is little we can do if the person is not willing to help themselves. Being an eternal empath, I have learned am still learning this the hard way bringing myself close to exhaustion.

To this day, my best and more fruitful scientific collaborations stem from long-standing connections with former students and colleagues, some of which I am now lucky enough to call my friends, locally or across the world, with whom I maintain active communication but also of whom I take care. It is impressive to see how many academic connections turn sour because of strong egos, of miscommunication, of hiring committees or political “House of cards” power trips. But I have had the joy as well of seeing some of these connections bloom to long lasting friendships which are most important to face the challenges of academia. In the bigger scheme of things, there are much more important things than who got a prize, who got hired, who was right. There is so much suffering and sadness in fostering negativity in our professional environment, but the only thing we can control is our own behaviour. So in this quest of making and keeping academia a positive environment, we need to start with ourselves, our behaviour, our connections, with our colleagues, with our students. We need to focus on and foster connections that are positive and constructive. To stop spending 80% of our time on the few problematic individuals and 20% on all the positive ones… yet easier said than done? I need to keep reading this post…

The key to these positive connections I believe is gratitude and kindness.

I will finish this post by thanking my family, my friends, my colleagues, and my students for being so fun to work with. You are making a hell of a difference on a daily basis, from afar or right in the office next door!

Thank you!