From Scarcity to Abundance: Scholars and Scholarship in an Age of GenAI (Grimes et al., 2024)

Welcome to Revise and Resubmit, where we explore the most thought-provoking academic research and bring it to life for our listeners. Today, we’re diving into a topic that’s on everyone’s mind—artificial intelligence. But not just any AI, we’re talking about Generative AI and how it’s shaping the world of academic scholarship. Our featured paper, From Scarcity to Abundance: Scholars and Scholarship in an Age of Generative Artificial Intelligence, is written by Matthew Grimes, Georg von Krogh, Stefan Feuerriegel, Floor Rink, and Marc Gruber, and published in the Academy of Management Journal by the Academy of Management in December 2023. Generative AI, like the popular ChatGPT, has taken the world by storm. It’s helping to write essays, generate art, and now—transform scholarly research. The authors of this paper explore how these AI tools promise to revolutionize every stage of academic knowledge creation. From synthesizing existing research to aiding in creative breakthroughs, the potential is enormous. But there’s a flip side. Along with the promise of efficiency and rigor, AI also introduces serious risks—AI hallucinations, deep research fakes, and even questions about the authenticity of human scholarship. As scholars and AI continue to intersect, we’re left wondering: Will generative AI be a tool that advances human knowledge, or will it raise new ethical and methodological challenges we aren’t yet prepared for? Before we dive into this fascinating discussion, we’d like to thank the authors—Matthew Grimes, Georg von Krogh, Stefan Feuerriegel, Floor Rink, and Marc Gruber—and the Academy of Management for bringing us this timely piece. So, here’s the question we’re left with: Is the future of scholarship in the hands of machines, or will human judgment remain the ultimate guide? Reference Matthew Grimes, Georg von Krogh, Stefan Feuerriegel, Floor Rink, and Marc Gruber, 2023: From Scarcity to Abundance: Scholars and Scholarship in an Age of Generative Artificial Intelligence. AMJ, 66, 1617–1624, https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2023.4006