GenAI or GenIA - Use it to Generate Inspiration (if you must), not Automation

Does GenAI reinforce competition by celebrating the individual hero genius scientist, leading us to forget that academic discovery and engagement is about teams, not about individuals?

Anne-Wil Harzing - (updated Sat 10 May 2025 07:52)

© Copyright 2024-2025 Anne-Wil Harzing. All rights reserved. First version, 30 January 2025

GenAI or GenIA? Use it to Generate Inspiration (if you must), not Automation

When I saw LinkedIn Rewind cards like the one below popping up all over LinkedIn late 2024, I couldn’t help being curious. So I tried coauthor.studio myself. I suspect many others did too. Rather than the 5-10 minutes I expected, my LinkedIn Rewind took no less than 16 hours to create.

I feel rather guilty about the power consumption needed for this. So, even though I didn’t share my card, or the AI generated post, on LinkedIn, I felt I should put the materials to good use. Hence, in this white paper I am analysing the materials I received from coauthor.studio in an attempt to draw some lessons on the use of GenAI in academia from it.

The text that I received from coauthor.studio is in red to distinguish it from my own voice. I don’t generally like using red – I find it rather aggressive – but I am worried using blue or green would send the wrong signal. 😁

The card I received: clearly showing the limitation of AI

The stats on my cards are quite nice, though I can also get those from LinkedIn. Interestingly, they were a bit different from my LinkedIn analytics. So I am not sure which to believe. Two of the 2024 vibes are well-chosen. They describe my orientation well: Advocate (for a more Positive Academia) and Mentor (for ECRs/female academics in particular). That said, Advocate and Mentor/Coach pretty much seem to appear on every academic LinkedIn Rewind profile. So they are hardly distinctive.

That said, I have no clue where the Fellow vibe comes from. I searched for the word in my 2024 posts, and it was used three times in expressions such as “my fellow academics”. Most likely it is referring to me being an AIB Fellow, though this isn’t mentioned prominently on my profile. In the context of a LinkedIn post on why writing laudations or obituaries is a positive action, I mentioned my role as AIB Fellows bibliometrician; I write bibliographic analyses for AIB Fellows who passed away. But as I didn’t write any new ones in 2024, making this one of my vibes seems a rather big leap.

Most of my fellow academic LinkedIn posters have Professor and/or Researcher as one of their vibes. But I rarely post about my own research and my Professorial title isn’t prominent in my profile. So, I guess the algorithm struggled to find a third vibe and just made something up. 😁

My Top Quote and Superpower really show the limitations of AI. Superficially, they sound like things I could have said or done. However, I have never used the quote that is attributed to me, so how can it be deemed to be my Top Quote? Also, I would never have identified building academic excellence as the goal of my LinkedIn engagement. Excellence has a very specific connation in academia, and it is not one I particularly like.

Judging from the email and the suggested LinkedIn post that I received (see below), coauthor.studio appears to be confused by me (very) occasionally mentioning my own achievements in the context of a post on another topic. I guess this could be interpreted as academic excellence. And yes, many of my posts do indeed imply kindness, although they are more about expressing generosity and kindness through sharing materials than talking about kindness; the word is literally mentioned only four times in my posts.

Coauthor.studio thus seems to be trying to force a link between what it sees as two distinct strands in my posts: academic excellence and kindness. But this is not a link I would ever have made myself. What I would advocate is changing our concept of excellence to make it more inclusive, not building kinder paths to it.

The email I received: nice try, but no!

From expanding Positive Academia to reaching major citation milestones, you've made remarkable contributions to academic culture this year. Here's to continuing that momentum in building a more inclusive, supportive scholarly community in 2025!

Superficially, this looks like a decent summary. But it really isn’t.

First, I didn’t reach “major citation milestones”. I just casually mentioned how the fact that one of my papers had reached 600 citations that morning triggered a reflection on the content of that paper. So, I wrote a LinkedIn post about it. However, the post was not at all about citations, it was about writing with conviction if you feel something is wrong, even as a PhD student.

Second, reaching major citation milestones really isn’t a “remarkable contribution to academic culture”. If anything, a focus on citation milestones runs counter to what I profess as a desirable academic culture. A desirable culture would focus on quality content and the broader impact of our work, not on metrics.

If you'd like to post more, save time, and grow your influence to help shape positive change in academia in 2025, Coauthor can help you turn insights into influential content.

Look, I get it, they have a product to sell. But this seems to be all about how to become a social media influencer (and generate income?). That’s never been what my LinkedIn engagement has been about. I post when I have something to say. I don’t really care whether it is influential or not.

Some posts go viral, often unexpectedly. But if it resonates with just one person, that’s fine with me too. Writing posts so that they are more influential would take all the joy out of LinkedIn engagement and would make it a job. No thanks!

The LinkedIn post it generated for me: Urgh...

2024 taught me that transitions can be transformative. Moving to emerita status wasn't about stepping back - it was about stepping more fully into what matters: making academia a more positive, inclusive place for all.

Urgh… I don’t disagree with the content of the message. It "sort of" captures the reasons for me taking early retirement, though I only retired in October, i.e. the last quarter of the year. So, making this the headline is a bit much. But what annoys me most is the tone; it makes me want to throw up. If someone wrote this about themselves, I would think they are a prat. Only sales managers and automatic mission generators talk like this.

At Christmas 2024, I received the thank-you message below from one of my mentees. Although I am very happy with the generous and supportive bit, what means most to me is the “sincere” and “no pomposity” bit. I just can’t stand people who are full of themselves.

You are one of the most generous, sincere and supportive persons in the modern world of academia. And no pomposity! Thank you for that.

Major developments that shaped our academic community this year:

When talking about our academic community, I would never list my personal contributions, i.e. research impact & recognition, as one of the “major developments that shaped” it, let alone leading the post with it. That’s just hubris to me. It is also antithetical to my belief that in order to make a difference we all need to contribute. 

As I will show later in this white paper, this self-centred narrative seems to characterise many of the coauthor.studio suggestions. This is quite remarkable, because I hardly ever post anything without explicitly mentioning the collaborative nature of the work and the (many) other academics involved. In fact, I typically lead with them.

So, this makes me wonder: does the use of GenAI reinforce competition, celebrating the individual hero genius scientist? [see also my discussion about the need for team builders here: Supporting Early Career Researchers]

📚 Research Impact & Recognition

  • First academic paper reached 600 citations (written as a PhD student!)
  • HRMJ article on linguistic diversity in top 10% most read papers
  • Journal Quality List approaching its 25th anniversary with 40,000+ annual downloads
  • Publish or Perish software turning 18 and still evolving

How did coauthor.studio do in terms of specifics? Well, I like that it picked up my most frequently used icons. That was a very nice touch and it did manage to use them in the right context. The last two bullet points are also correct. The Journal Quality list was first launched early in 2000 and the Publish or Perish software in 2006. What would be more important to me though is to emphasise that both of these resources have always been free. Otherwise, this reads more like a sales pitch to me.

Moreover, I wouldn’t consider the first two bullet points to be issues that shaped our academic community. These are just two minor personal achievements that I shared. Only someone who doesn’t understand the content of these words (i.e. AI) would say these things have “shaped our academic community”.

They are also ambiguous. When read quickly, the first bullet point could be interpreted as it being the first time that a paper of mine reached 600 citations and that this is somehow a stellar achievement. The first is definitely not true as I have published fourteen other papers with more than 600 citations. The second is debatable too. 

The second bullet point omits the crucial context, the paper was within the top-10% most read Wiley papers that first came online in a particular year (2022). It also omits the context of my post, i.e. the fact that the post started with the following: My LinkedIn followers know I very rarely post about my own achievements. I don't think it sets the right tone for a positive academic culture if senior academics do this too often.

In sum, it seems like coauthor.studio has simply grouped all posts that included some sort of quantitative metrics and listed them as impact & recognition.

🌻 Community Building & Support

  • CYGNA Women in Academia Network approaching 10-year milestone
  • Organized final Middlesex University writing boot-camp
  • Expanded career guides reaching more academics globally
  • Launched new initiatives through Positive Academia

Well done on this one, coauthor.studio did group similar things together, though arguably the career guides fit the next section better. However, none of these bullet points are 100% correct.

  • The CYGNA network didn’t approach its 10-year milestone, it reached it and we celebrated it in June 2024.
  • I did organize a Middlesex University boot-camp and yes given that I retired shortly after it, it is the last one I will organize. But that doesn’t mean it is the final Middlesex University boot-camp.
  • The career guides might well have reached more academics globally, but I didn’t expand them. They were all published in 2022 or 2023 and haven’t changed since.
  • Yes, we did launch new initiatives through Positive Academia, but without any detail this is a bit of a weaselly and superficial statement. Most importantly, many of these initiatives were spearheaded by Christa Sathish, my co-conspirator in Positive Academia, not me.

So ultimately the nuance in these statements is completely missing. And nuance is what is important to me as an academic.

👉 Resource Development

  • Published comprehensive new guide to the PoP software
  • Created accessible career development materials
  • Expanded free online resources for academics
  • Enhanced support for multilingual scholars

I liked the fact that it picked up that resource development is an important part of what I do and have done since 1999. You can find a collator page here: Working in academia.

However, these four bullet points are either wrong or too general to be helpful. First, I didn’t publish a comprehensive new guide to the PoP software in 2024, that was in August 2023. 

Second, although there are plenty of accessible career development materials on my website, they weren’t created this year, they have been created in the last 25 years, as have the free online resources. As all these resources deal with career development in academia, these bullet points say the same thing twice.

Given my research interest in the role of Language in International Business I would have loved to enhance support for multilingual scholars. But honestly I didn’t! I have a section on my website with Publish or Perish training resources that includes an overview of training videos created by PoP usersin languages other than English. But I have never posted on this (maybe I should!) and it hasn't been updated for year. So I have no idea where that came from.

Three posts that particularly resonated with our community:

I didn’t mind these three posts being highlighted as they convey messages that I really do care about. There were quite a few posts with more impressions. So the criterion for listing them appears to be likes and comments, not impressions. This is fair enough as it does signal more engagement. I am also pleased to see that AI picked up good lead sentences for these posts; it reassures me that I have written coherent posts. 😁

However, it should be noted that quoting the first sentence is a bit misleading, as it suggests that this is literally what I wrote, which is not the case. In this case, this didn't do any major harm, but I would prefer quotes in posts only to be used only for literal quotes to my work.

"Academic Housework Gender Disparity". On why structural changes are needed for true academic equality. "We will not make progress in providing more inclusive academic careers until we start recognising this."

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7234594324338860036/

Here, the URL link that is provided doesn’t go the correct post. It links to another post on a similar theme that doesn’t include the quote nor the call for structural changes. This is how inaccurate citations are created! Here is is the correct link  

"First Paper Journey". On persistence and conviction in academic writing. "If as a PhD student you stumble upon something in the literature that simply doesn't make any sense, don't hold back and write with conviction."

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7245075115330142208/

Although the lead sentence here is ok-ish as I do talk about my first academic paper, it does put the focus on me and my publications, which is what I wanted to avoid in this post. This post actually started with "To all PhD students out there who are doubting their work, persist!".  This is what I would have preferred as the lead sentence. As to the sentence that was correctly quoted from my post, I would have preferred the short sentence following it - "As long as you do it with respect." - to have been included. 

"Cumberland Lodge Writing Bootcamp". On building supportive academic communities. "The flexible structure meant that the weekend wasn't just super-productive, but also super-enjoyable and really brought us closer together as researchers."

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7244601580447047680/

I remember the first two posts going viral (well viral in academic terms 😁), but I was rather surprised to see the third one appearing in the top-3. It was a simple report on a writing bootcamp that I have organised (and written about) for Middlesex University eight times before.

The reason why it attracted so many comments was not in fact the bootcamp. All the comments were about the fact that I announced my retirement in the post 😁. I also felt that it would have been better to let the participants speak for themselves (as I did in the post), rather than reproduce one of my own statements.

But these are minor issues, and I can see myself using these three posts to write about my LinkedIn activity for the year. On the other hand, creating a narrative based on the top three posts is something that LinkedIn might well be able to integrate based on their own engagement statistics.

Looking ahead: 2025 will be about expanding what works - growing Positive Academia, celebrating CYGNA's 10th anniversary, and continuing to provide resources that help academics thrive. Excellence and kindness aren't opposing forces in academia - they're most powerful when working together.

Apart from not picking up that the CYGNA 10-year anniversary is now long in the past, this is a fair summary of what I will do. Here again though, AI seems to insist on linking excellence and kindness. As I said earlier, I feel very uncomfortable about this.

To everyone working to make academia more inclusive and positive: your everyday actions matter more than you know. Let's keep building this culture together. 🌻

This is the only sentence that I might consider using. It still reads a bit too “slick” for me, but it does capture the spirit of the #EveryLittleActionCounts well. My only problem? This campaign wasn’t created by me, it was created by Christa Sathish, as I have mentioned in every single post about it. So, again this makes me wonder: does AI lead us to forget that academic discovery and engagement is about teams, not about individuals?

In sum

The AI summary of my 2024 LinkedIn year makes sense superficially and none of it is 100% wrong. Let’s put it this way: if a contractor had written this for me, I wouldn’t sue them for defamation 😁. However, the vast majority of it is either not 100% right or is so generic that it isn’t of much use.

Another user who ran his LinkedIn rewind twice with 6 days apart ended up getting two substantively different outcomes, even though he had only posted twice in the intervening period. Interestingly, the number of comments he received also appears to have gone backwards in that period.

Accuracy, specificity, and replicability are all essential in academia. If we as academics do not uphold these values, who will? And yes, I know this is “only for fun”, but academics are already getting AI to write accessible summaries of their research.

How long before a crucial caveat is missed in the interpretation of the data, before something that was applicable to a specific country, industry, organizational, or individual demographic context is presented as universal? Or, worse, before a full stop is interpreted as a comma or visa versa when parsing data (most countries use decimal commas, whereas English-speaking countries use decimal stops).

Obviously, the problem is that whilst I know what is wrong and what is right in the above text, the reader doesn’t. I might be able to use AI as inspiration for my communications, provided that I do a very careful proofread word by word every single time. Careless posting of AI generated text might only introduce further inaccuracies into the AI training materials.

Moreover, other academics might use AI to automatically summarize my work and will not know what is correct and what isn’t. Hence, it will only aggravate the problem of inaccurate referencing that I signalled nearly 25 years ago. Go through this cycle of AI interpretation after AI interpretation a few times and we will end up with an avalanche of Chinese whispers, or at the very least a sanitised and superficialized version of the text.

And yes, I know I am a bit of a nit-picker, but in academia that is often essential. Many of my research projects have involved forensically analysing errors that were made by commercial companies, generally due to lack of care and/or human oversight of automated technology. Here are a few other blogposts on this.

What I did like

I did like the fact it structured my year in three sections, followed by bullet-pointed examples. This inspired me to think about my work at a higher level of aggregation, something that – as a detail-oriented person – doesn’t always come naturally to me.

However, out of the twelve bullet points that AI picked for me, I would have only listed 3 or 4 myself. And I am not sure the energy consumption was worth it. I could have reached the same outcome by talking to a colleague who is better versed into abstraction. That would have also strengthened the academic community and might have sparked ideas with them too.

What others have shared

Loads of LinkedIn Rewinds have been published on LinkedIn. Interestingly, most posters seem to like them, although reading through them they were all too slick for my liking. So I systematically checked the accounts of academics whose posts I will always read, because they are not just interesting, but also reflect the posters’ uniqueness. Two of them – Jason Thatcher and Maja Korica – shared their own cards, as well as the LinkedIn post that coauthor.studio suggested.

Here is Maja’s post. Like me she is an AI sceptic, and I absolutely love her reflections on reading her LinkedIn Rewind.

Getting that generated text as an AI non-using sceptic made me immediately impressed, but also horrified. This card […] told me that I posted every 2-3 days this year. Each one of those words was my own. They said something about things I thought important, and I figured them and myself out as I wrote them. My words made connections and made me feel connected too. That is why I am on here, arguably much more than I should be.

What is the point of sharing however if the voice we use is not even ours? I am not trying to sell a product here, I am trying to build community. Wholly AI generated texts can only be a distraction from, if not a dangerous barrier to that goal. You cannot be in community with people who don't actually know you.

I also really liked one of the comments on her post, which to me really captures the concern I had about my own AI-generated post:

The AI post is a lot more self-centred than yours are. And if it were a human writing it, I'd say they were trying too hard. Your authentic voice is much better.

Here is Jason’s post. He likewise comments on the self-centred nature of the post (“or this product knows how to butter a content creator up”). Interestingly, his post only generated two (unreflective) comments and 49 likes, way less than Jason’s normal posts. I did find some comfort in that...

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Copyright © 2025 Anne-Wil Harzing. All rights reserved. Page last modified on Sat 10 May 2025 07:52

Anne-Wil Harzing is Emerita Professor of International Management at Middlesex University, London. She is a Fellow of the Academy of International Business, a select group of distinguished AIB members who are recognized for their outstanding contributions to the scholarly development of the field of international business. In addition to her academic duties, she also maintains the Journal Quality List and is the driving force behind the popular Publish or Perish software program.

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