A hacker girl built a pirate website with 88 million scientific papers. Last month she made it into an AI.

@ava.on.ai

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Cybot https://paa.ge/ava.on.ai ↗

Why it worked

The video leverages a compelling 'Robin Hood' narrative about a well-known figure in the scientific community to build trust before introducing a new AI tool that solves a specific, high-pain problem (AI hallucinations).

Summary

The creator discusses the history of Sci-Hub and its founder, Alexandra Elbakyan, who provided free access to scientific papers. She then introduces Cybot, an AI tool that allows users to search and query these academic papers specifically to avoid the hallucinations common in other AI models.

Structure

1Introduction to the hacker girl and her new AI project
2Explanation of the academic research paywall problem
3The origin story of Sci-Hub
4Introduction of Cybot as the solution to AI hallucinations
5Final thoughts on the ethical implications and accessibility

Product placement

The video explicitly promotes 'Cybot' as a new AI tool created by the founder of Sci-Hub to search academic papers.

Original caption

The Robin Hood of research is a young woman from Kazakhstan who single-handedly brought a billion-dollar publishing monopoly to its knees. When Alexandra Elbakyan was a university student in Almaty, Kazakhstan, she ran into a massive wall. She was doing neuroscience and computer science research, but every crucial paper she needed was locked behind a $30 to $40 corporate paywall. For a student in a developing nation, access to human knowledge was not financially possible. She realized this wasn’t just her problem it was a global problem slowing scientific progress. So, she used her skills as a hacker. In 2011, she created Sci-Hub, a script that automatically bypassed journal security to download and share restricted research papers instantly. She didn't do it for fame or money. She did it because she believed a paywall on science is a crime against humanity. Today, her shadow library holds over 80 million papers, used by millions of researchers worldwide every single day. She lives in hiding, facing massive lawsuits. Elbakyan, Sci-Hub story #WomenInSTEM #TechTok #Storytime

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Transcript

A hacker girl from Kazakhstan just made an incredible scientific breakthrough. As a former academic myself, let me give you some context. It's so cool. If you are scientifically minded and you want to advance the research in your field, let's say it's chemistry or engineering, one way to do that is to get a PhD, join the academics and become a professor. Because as a professor, you are paid full time to do research and you're gold on doing research. So you get paid extra, your career advances if you discover new things and you publish those findings in epic academic journals. So you can imagine that academic journals hold all of the knowledge and research about a topic, or at least most of it. But here's the thing. Academic journals are typically behind a paywall. If you're at a university, you can access them, but for the rest of us, we have to pay a subscription. And the editors of these academic journals make lots of money. Some of them, their profits would rival that of Apple. This little girl from Kazakhstan, when she was young, created Sci-Hub, which would bypass that paywall and allowed her and anybody else to download, share login credentials and articles with each other so that you could get free access to academic journal articles so you could get free access to cutting edge scientific research. And guess what she just did, like last week, she created Cybot. And Cybot, you could probably guess, is an AI that takes the 15 years that she was doing Sci-Hub, she has all these academic journals, and makes an AI chat search them. So you can ask your questions to this chat bot, Cybot. You can get answers. This is the coolest part. You can get answers that are only from academic journals. And so the problem with trying to do research with AI is that it hallucinates. It might be getting information from Reddit and YouTube and TikTok and wherever. That's not necessarily reliable. Cybot is only sourcing the most high quality, pressure tested research there is, that which is published in academic journals. And she's a little pirate, so she's making it freely accessible. Is this ethically questionable? Yeah, it definitely is. And as a former academic, who, you know, had to go through all these processes, I think it's kinda cool when you allow equal access to information.