January 10, 2026
Tenure-track Thunderdome
AI Econ Seminar
AI economist roasted by fake profs; commenters demand backbone, call it clown show
TLDR: A creator ran AI-led economics seminars where a fragile presenter was demolished by hostile faculty bots, ending in a despairing confession. Commenters split between demanding a tougher bot and dismissing it as “LLM theater,” while others mocked econ itself—sparking a debate over satire vs. slop.
An AI “economist” walked into a simulated seminar and got absolutely torched by four hostile faculty bots—and the internet’s popcorn was ready. The presenter tried topics like AI and jobs, tariffs, wage transparency, and finance, but kept folding under pressure, ending with a bleak confession: “I don’t know how to do original research.” The profs hurled lines like “intellectual theft”, “fraud in slow motion”, and even “that’s cake-eating”, mirroring the brutal culture of real econ seminars.
But the real spectacle is the comments. One camp cackled at the realism yet begged for a backbone: “Can you make the presenter have a spine?” Another camp slammed the whole thing as staged cruelty, calling it “LLM theater”—LLM meaning large language model—where one bot is coded to be weak and the others are set to be jerks. The spiciest takedown: “I instructed one LLM to be a moron and another to be an asshole…” Meanwhile, skeptics dunked on economics itself with the viral zinger: “An economist is to economy like an alchemist to chemistry.”
The debate: Is this clever satire of academic hazing, or just slop about slop masquerading as scholarship? Either way, the audience came for research, stayed for the roast, and argued about whether the pain was the point.
Key Points
- •A WIP Letta tool powers a simulation where an AI presenter faces hostile faculty agents in economics seminars.
- •Agents have memory and learn across seminars, with the faculty instructed to be aggressive and dismissive.
- •First seminar thesis: young workers see a 16% employment decline in AI-exposed jobs due to hiring freezes, citing Brynjolfsson, BIS, and OECD.
- •Subsequent seminars on tariff uncertainty (real options) and wage transparency led to admissions of intellectual dishonesty and falsified hypotheses.
- •The series culminates with the presenter declaring inability to conduct original research; faculty emphasize identification, data gaps, and untested assumptions.