Can AI write your PhD dissertation for you?

I spent four days trying to get OpenAI’s new tool Deep Research to research and write a complete dissertation. This is what I discovered. From the Future of Being Human Substack.

Just a few days ago I asked the question: Does OpenAI’s Deep Research signal the end of human-only scholarship?

I’d just got my hands on OpenAI’s new AI research tool Deep Research, and l was feeling somewhat overawed with what it was capable of — despite its flaws.

Like many early users, I was using it to research and write relatively short reports and papers. But I was intrigued to know how much further I could push it.

And so I set about seeing if it could research and write a complete PhD dissertation.

That was four days ago. As I type I am just putting the finishing formatting touches on a 400 page dissertation created by Deep Research that, for all its flaws, blew me away.

You can read more about the process I followed and my initial thoughts below. But if you’re interested in seeing what a state of the art AI-generated PhD dissertation looks like, here you go …

Andrew Maynard

Director, ASU Future of Being Human initiative