Joshua Gans, an economist at the University of Toronto, published a recent Substack essay that might give pause to researchers and scholars in all fields: “Reflections on Vibe Researching: My year-long experiment in AI first research.” His opening:

“Write me a paper that will get published in Econometrica.”

I tried that prompt (and nothing more than it) this morning with ChatGPT 5.2 Pro and it actually produced an entire paper. Here it is. I have no idea what it is saying or whether it is complete nonsense or not. But it took 19 minutes and 10 seconds to produce. To be clear, ChatGPT didn’t think it was a publishable paper and that it needed more work. So I decided to ask Gemini if the paper made any sense and it said:

“The paper is scientifically coherent. It identifies a genuine gap in a top-tier paper (the computational slowness of OT-GMM) and applies the correct mathematical tool (Debiased Sinkhorn) to fix it. If implemented, this would likely be a publishable contribution in econometrics.”

What if a law professor were to give ChatGPT the prompt: “Write me a paper that will get published in the Harvard Law Review”?

That raises dozens of ethical questions, but I’m more interested in that practical one. Could ChatGPT or any of its rivals (in any of their variations, write a publishable work of legal scholarship? What further questions would the answer (yes? no?) raise?

Perhaps that’s been done? The asking? The writing? The submitting? The publishing?