AI boosts research careers but narrow the span of ideas explored: study

dickersnoodle

This isn't a real surprise to anyone who knows how "AI" works.

xmcp123

“Technology that is based on everything humanity has already done, fails to do things that humanity has not yet done”

Nevermark

Any flattening of discovery due to AI, but will be temporary. We tend to think that obvious potential is the same as realized potential, for new technology. For any specific context, there are generally innumerable smaller adaptations and capability thresholds that have to be crossed. And the price for that journey is often temporary loss off overt productivity.

Labo333

> “It’s not about the architecture per se,” Evans says. “It’s about the incentives.” It would have been useful to check whether less original work was already getting more citations before AI adoption. That could reflect broader trends and network effects: heavily cited research areas attract more authors optimizing for citations, so high-productivity researchers end up clustering on the same topics.

skeledrew

As with other fields touched, AI is merely amplifying what was already there. The aim of many scientists isn't discovery in and of itself. Discovery is a side effect of their primary drive to publish and - hopefully - become well known. And establishments only make things worse, because it's the things that are most likely to produce tangible results (the papers, or economically valuable products) that get the most funding.

bwfan123

> AI is largely automating the most tractable parts of science rather than expanding its frontiers By definition, creativity cannot be automated, and AI is a fantastic automation machine. It can explore thinking paths at a rate humans cannot match. But creativity is bringing the unthinkable into the thinkable, and that requires sensory experience [1]. Specifically, new definitions and symbols which never existed before. Imagine the concept vector space, and expanding that with new independent dimensions. Is that even possible ? When you look at history the answer is yes !. And each time there was an independent dimension added, it was an act of genius. It is an instructive exercise to name these moments in history where an independent dimension was added to human thought. Some examples in math would be the invention of a number, and in politics could be the idea of democracy. By contrast, LLMs are trapped in the vector space they are trained on, and they lack the feedback loop with sensory experience to be able to create and validate theories. [1] https://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/28024/1/Scientific_Inventio...

cynicalsecurity

AI has been seriously around for how long? Two years? Isn't it a bit too early to say?

jdw64

I agree with some parts, but not all. I see it as an overfitting problem. Fundamentally, the topic here seems to be that citation indices and similar metrics are actually flawed indicators, and obsessing over them is just Goodhart's law in action. Ultimately, the argument is that the entire design of those metrics is wrong. To be precise, it was a good metric at first, but now that the scale has changed, it's become bad. This is common in programming too—things that are correct in the beginning but become problematic as they grow larger. From an individual researcher's perspective, it's rational. You get more citations, your career accelerates. Everyone knows this. Paper counts aren't everything. Citation counts aren't everything. Journal impact factors aren't everything. You shouldn't only play it safe. But everything is tied to those metrics anyway. Most researchers who give me work are fully aware of these facts. But are they going to change anything? Funding is still distributed based on those metrics. Max Planck said, 'Science advances one funeral at a time.' Science doesn't progress purely through reasoned argument. The authority of the older generation, research funding networks, journals, and school-specific evaluation criteria all move together. And honestly, I think discoveries will keep happening—probably quite rapidly. Because AI doesn't have the factional conflicts or interpersonal issues that humans do. It's very good at connecting papers across schools of thought without bias. In other words, the current human system is flawed at consolidating research, but I think AI is actually strong in this area. I expect AI-driven discoveries will continue for some time. The people who ride this wave will clearly be the winners. Everyone knows things are broken, but no one is trying to fix them. I always think human society is inefficient. I read this post, but I'm more curious about who will actually lead the improvement effort.

hiddencost

The entire article seems to rest on their use of an embedding model for clustering garbage science.

dahart

> Scientists who adopt AI gain productivity and visibility: On average, they publish three times as many papers, receive nearly five times as many citations, and become team leaders a year or two earlier than those who do not. To me this effect doesn’t seem to reflect on AI very much, it seems to reflect on humans. Like maybe this is more evidence of the Babble Hypothesis and the incentives in research than AI, no? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Babble_hypothesis

curious_cat_163

We are headed towards the “trough of disillusion” of this particular cycle.

abalashov

It's almost like it's inherent in the definition of LLMs. It's really, _really_ high time we dispensed with the idea that this is "AI". Nobody said they're not useful, but "AI" they are not.

radarsat1

"boost research careers".. seems like a pretty drastic conclusion to draw based on a technology that has existed for like 3 years and only lately is any good..

koe123

I enjoy using AI loads. Yet I would be keen to see numbers on actual productivity increases. This reads as yet another datapoint similar to what I’ve experienced: maybe code was the bottleneck at some point, maybe now it isn’t but in my lived experience the bottleneck has simply shifted. Its easy to create “more” but to actually hit the business goals… I don’t see a 2x TRUE productivity boost in anyone in my company. Please feel free to disagree with me! I am keen to hear more anecdotes to get more datapoints.

a-dub

sounds like it is just supercharging the business of science with all of its known failings? it would be funny if by accelerating the enterprise it actually forced an effort to correct the trajectory.

aborsy

A new breed of academics has appeared whose jobs is to put their names in every paper possible. Literally, their job is to work on frameworks to buy co-authorship. They do this in various ways, like establishing paper pipelines, collecting rents on labs and committees, focusing on money layer, using their profiles and citation count to help with acceptance of papers of other people , etc. You talk to them and they can’t explain their papers beyond a superficial introduction. They collect huge citations, travel and give talk on the winner horses, collect credit, which feeds back into this fraudulent scheme. A scientist used to be a scientist not long ago, not a credit collector. I wonder if Google could invent a new metric to expose them (weak ratio of first authorship, etc).

jurschreuder

Ironically it's also written by AI :) I like LLM's but this writing style is like eating the same dish 4 times a day.

gammarator

At the present moment I think science is way more threatened by the OMB absconding with the grant budget than it is by AI.

rbartelme

As a bioinformatics person that's spent time in and out of industry/academia, I agree with some of the article's thesis. While I don't think LLMs or AI are going away, I do think it will allow people in academia to pump out a bunch of inane papers and continue to prop up predatory scientific journal publishing via tenure and promotion. In fact outside of how utterly useless Fable 5 is via their aggressive guard rails for my work, I quite like using statically typed and/or functional languages with other LLMs since there are some baked in guardrails via compiler + type system. I think the flattening of progress is the most interesting dimension to the article. For an example a useful biological product discovery with a nonlinear path to get to there, look at the Taq polymerase ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taq_polymerase ). Without some NSF funded exploratory ecological research by Tom Brock in Yellowstone Hot Springs to test the theoretical limit of life at high temperatures ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermus_aquaticus ) we never get to the Taq polymerase, we never get reliable/robust PCR ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polymerase_chain_reaction ), which is now a gold standard method in both clinical and environmental testing! It is rather improbable to think that large language models would associate those domain connections across the topic (molecular biotechnology + ecology + microbial physiology). I also did some exploratory work with text embedding models people might use for RAG and challenged them with an open source scientific MCA question dataset, generalist embedders performed worse vs. domain specific embedders trained on scientific corpora (doesn't surprise me at all). However, if everything regresses to the median of the universe of possible knowledge, it seems like scientific leaning frontier models would get locked into this asymptotic flattening before turning cashflow positive for model vendors OR they become so locked down that only big pharma, state actors, or big ag can afford the API rates and vetting process.

overgard

I think we're finding measures of "productivity" in almost all fields are pretty bad and AI is a great way to game them. PR's, papers, etc. We have to stop looking at volume-of-stuff as a useful metric.