Producing More but Understanding Less: The Risks of AI for Scientific Research
Freeman writes:
Last month, we witnessed the viral sensation of several egregiously bad AI-generated figures published in a peer-reviewed article in Frontiers, a reputable scientific journal. Scientists on social media expressed equal parts shock and ridicule at the images, one of which featured a rat with grotesquely large and bizarre genitals.
As Ars Senior Health Reporter Beth Mole reported, looking closer only revealed more flaws, including the labels "dissilced," "Stemm cells," "iollotte sserotgomar," and "dck." Figure 2 was less graphic but equally mangled, rife with nonsense text and baffling images. Ditto for Figure 3, a collage of small circular images densely annotated with gibberish.
[...] While the proliferation of errors is a valid concern, especially in the early days of AI tools like ChatGPT, two researchers argue in a new perspective published in the journal Nature that AI also poses potential long-term epistemic risks to the practice of science.
Molly Crockett is a psychologist at Princeton University who routinely collaborates with researchers from other disciplines in her research into how people learn and make decisions in social situations. Her co-author, Lisa Messeri, is an anthropologist at Yale University whose research focuses on science and technology studies (STS), analyzing the norms and consequences of scientific and technological communities as they forge new fields of knowledge and invention-like AI.
[...] The paper's tagline is "producing more while understanding less," and that is the central message the pair hopes to convey. "The goal of scientific knowledge is to understand the world and all of its complexity, diversity, and expansiveness," Messeri told Ars. "Our concern is that even though we might be writing more and more papers, because they are constrained by what AI can and can't do, in the end, we're really only asking questions and producing a lot of papers that are within AI's capabilities."
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