I left academia ten years ago. My legacy? A monograph and some peer-reviewed articles. Mostly unread, I am afraid. It was pretty niche anyway.
But for the monograph I still get royalties every year. Last year it was 13.06 EUR. That translates into half a pizza Margherita in Zurich. So, I’d say: I was a modestly successful scholar.
But times have changed. Posthumously I seem to have become very relevant. I have a super fan who has read every single piece of work.
How come? A few days ago, I stumbled across a piece in The Atlantic, describing Meta’s use of LibGen, one of the largest pirated libraries, to train its large language model, Llama 3.
I typed my name into the LibGen metadata search, just for fun. And there it was: my entire academic legacy, absorbed by AI.
“Someone” has been reading every single paper I wrote. Not for scholarly debate. Not for peer feedback. But to stuff it down the throat of a data-hungry chatbot.
No citations. No royalties. No recognition. Just silent swallowing by an LLM.
And yet some say this is “democratizing access to knowledge.”
Really? No human reads my work. But AI does—behind closed doors, without credit, and with commercial intent.
That’s not democratization. That’s appropriation. Or, given that Big Tech is involved, it’s downright oligarchization.
So, clearly: recognition is changing.
From now on, I propose a new metric, expressing how many LLMs found my work digestible. And journals should finally get over impact factors and switch to chatbot influence scores.
I first shared these reflections on LinkedIn on March 25, 2025.