a layperson cannot be relied upon to draw meaningful conclusions from a scholarly article. i learned this when i tried to do it. have you ever tried to read a spanish book, without knowing spanish, with nothing but an english-spanish dictionary? it’s very slow going and it works alright until someone speaks in idiom or metaphor, but even then you can mostly still get it. this is not always the case with scholarly articles.

moreover, it’s a waste of time. if it takes you 30 hours to look up every term and graph, but it would have taken your biology friend 20 minutes to synthesize it for you, there’s an obvious solution here. if an LLM can save you 30 hours, and your biology friend 20 minutes, it’s a useful tool.