Somewhere, a peer reviewer just realized they may have been outsmarted by a machine.

Intology’s Zochi has achieved something unprecedented: becoming the first AI system to independently pass peer review at an A* scientific conference. Not just any conference—ACL, one of the most prestigious venues in computational linguistics.

“Zochi represents a significant step forward in AI-assisted research, demonstrating the ability to comprehend and analyze complex academic literature with remarkable accuracy.”

But that undersells what actually happened. This is academia’s Turing Test: when AI crossed the threshold from research tool to research colleague. If human experts can’t distinguish AI-generated research from human work, we’re facing fundamental questions about authorship, originality, and what constitutes scientific contribution. What are the implications. Will conferences soon be flooded with AI submissions? How do we handle attribution when an algorithm is the primary investigator? Could this democratize research globally, or will it devalue human scholarly work?

Similar to how Simon Willison describes his difficulties managing images for his approach to running a link blog I found it hard to remain true to pure markdown syntax but have images embedded in a responsive way on this site.

My current pipeline is as follows: I host my all my images in a R2 bucket and serve them from static.philippdubach.com. I use Cloudflares’s image resizing CDN do I never have to worry about serving images in appropriate size or format. I basically just upload them with the highes possible quality and Cloudflare takes care of the rest.

Since the site runs on Hugo, I needed a solution that would work within this static site generation workflow. Pure markdown syntax like ![alt](url) is clean and portable, but it doesn’t give me the responsive image capabilities I was looking for.

The solution I settled on was creating a Hugo shortcode that leverages Cloudflare’s image transformations while maintaining a simple, markdown-like syntax. The shortcode generates a <picture> element with multiple <source> tags, each targeting different screen sizes and serving WebP format. Here’s how it works: instead of writing standard markdown image syntax, I use {{ img src="image.jpg" alt="Description" }} in my posts. Behind the scenes, the shortcode constructs URLs for different breakpoints. This means I upload one high-quality image, but users receive perfectly sized versions - a 320px wide WebP for mobile users, a 1600px version for desktop, and everything in between. The shortcode defaults to displaying images at 80% width and centered, but I can override this with a width parameter when needed. It’s a nice compromise between the simplicity of markdown and the power of modern responsive image techniques. The syntax remains clean and the performance benefits are substantial - especially important since images are often the heaviest assets on any webpage.