When AI Hurts Science

Could the use of AI in writing research papers break science?

Image generated with Pixlr

As part of my recent research consulting on an Intellectual Property (IP) project for a Swiss energy company, I came across an article on ScienceDirect, which I found a bit concerning.

Usually, readers expect papers published on ScienceDirect to be of a certain quality and standard and (at least until now) based on genuine human research and scientific methods. The first paragraph of this Introduction section itself reveals that it is [very] likely drafted by AI:

How is it possible that the authors and reviewers missed this?

Or, has it already become such a common practice that going forward, this will be the new “way of science”?

Writing a scientific article was an honor, a matter of dignity with clear, widely agreed-upon ethics. What happens in the age of AI to the standards researchers shared for decades?

Don’t get me wrong. I am not against using AI for editing content (we all benefit from a good spell-checker), but I find it concerning when authors stop adhering to scientific principles. How do we know the entire paper was not written by AI — and peer-reviewed that way, too?

AI already has the power to develop new physics theories, but what are these new theories worth if we lose science’s human questioning, ingenuity, and diligence?

Should science even care?

"Imagination is more important than knowledge." — Albert Einstein

To me, AI does not have real imagination. Yes, it has algorithms that create the illusion of such creative force, but ultimately, at this stage, all it has is what humans give it. So if you give AI a theory that has never worked before, it will have the same “success”.

Our minds, on the other hand (as hard as it may be for some of us), have come to realize that to err is human and that the beauty in such human failure is the inherent ability to learn, progress, and eventually find the answers we have been looking for.

To get to such answers is hard work and they typically don’t come inspired by convenience.

Science would do well to remember that.