Artificial Intelligence (AI) tools are already being widely used in science. But can they, and the science they help produce, be trusted? (Science and Technology)
In the past year, generative artificial intelligence tools — such as ChatGPT, Gemini, and OpenAI's video generation tool Sora — have captured the public's imagination.
All that is needed to start experimenting with AI is an internet connection and a web browser. You can interact with AI like you would with a human assistant: by talking to it, writing to it, showing it images or videos, or all of the above.
While this capability marks entirely new terrain for the general public, scientists have used AI as a tool for many years. But with greater public knowledge of AI will come greater public scrutiny of how it's being used by scientists.
AI is already revolutionising science — six percent of all scientific work leverages AI, not just in computer science, but in chemistry, physics, psychology and environmental science.
Nature, one of the world's most prestigious scientific journals, included ChatGPT on its 2023 Nature's 10 list of the world's most influential and, until then, exclusively human scientists.
The use of Artificial Intelligence in science is twofold.
At one level, AI can make scientists more productive.
When Google DeepMind released an AI-generated dataset of more than 380,000 novel material compounds, Lawrence Berkeley Lab used AI to run compound synthesis experiments at a scale orders of magnitude larger than what could be accomplished by humans.
But artificial intelligence has even greater potential: to enable scientists to make discoveries that otherwise would not be possible at all.
It was an AI algorithm that for the first time found signal patterns in brain-activity data that pointed to the onset of epileptic seizures, a feat that not even the most experienced human neurologist can repeat.
Early success stories of the use of artificial intelligence in science have led some to imagine a future in which scientists will collaborate with AI scientific assistants as part of their daily work.
That future is already here. CSIRO researchers are experimenting with AI science agents and have developed robots that can follow spoken language instructions to carry out scientific tasks during fieldwork.
While modern AI systems are impressively powerful — especially so-called artificial general intelligence tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini — they also have drawbacks.