The master’s thesis I chose for my analysis is as follows:
Guillaume Nicolas and Manuel Martins Da Silva, “AI-based production of content: obstacles, threats, and opportunities,” PhD diss., Louvain School of Management, Université catholique de Louvain, 2021, http://hdl.handle.net/2078.1/thesis:30296.
Level of design
The thesis looks just about exactly how one would expect a master’s thesis from a non design-centred institute to look. It is quite clean and uses a serif font in 12pt with 1,5 lines of spacing. Interestingly, the page numbers are in the sans-serif Calibri, which causes an aesthetically displeasing dissonance throughout the paper.
Degree of innovation
I think with any paper on AI, innovation is a two-sided sword. On one side, the mere capabilities of modern AI are incredibly innovative, so analysing them in a scientific context is too, however, as the technology is developing so rapidly, even the most innovative of papers will get outdated inevitably.
Independence
The paper was written by two students at the Louvain School of Management, Guillaume Nicolas & Manuel Martins de Silva, and was supervised by Paul Belleflamme. The paper seems to be independently written, but does frequently cite a conversation the authors had with their supervisor and lists a work of Belleflamme in their Bibliography.
Outline and structure
The paper is divided into three parts, each containing 2-5 chapters. The way these are listed is strange, however. I’m not sure if this is a standard for any kind of academic work, but the chapter numbers reset in new parts of the paper, meaning there are multiple Chapter 1s and/or Chapter 1.1s. This makes looking for specific parts in the paper slightly annoying and unnecessarily complicated.
Degree of communication
The wording of the paper is quite casual, yet leaves no claim unbacked. This makes for a comfortable read while never leaving the reader in the dark about where any piece of information came from. I found that particularly the historic sections of the paper are very digestible.
Scope of the work
At first glance the scope of the paper seems immense, given its title of ‘AI-based production of content’ implying that the paper is concerned with content creation itself. However, the paper is more concerned on the marketing and management side of things, comparing different business models of AI-based companies and analysing potential obstacles, threats and opportunities. While I can’t accurately judge the scope of work in a marketing and management context, the paper’s length of over 200 pages including its five interviews, one can assume that a lot of time and effort went into it.
Orthography and accuracy
As far as the main body of work goes, I was not able to notice any grammatical or spelling mistakes, in some interviews, however, some questionable grammar is noticeable, but that’s to be expected from spoken interviews, especially since I assume most of the interviews were conducted in a non-English language and then translated back to English.
Literature
The almost 30 page long bibliography includes websites, legal texts, physical as well as electronic books, journal articles and just about every other kind of media one can imagine, not even counting the interviews. The sheer number of literary sources is of course impressive, but I also found that the way they were being used in the paper was reader-friendly.
