Fraud and the false optimism of AI for science

This is Jessica. “Scientific doomerism” seems to be everywhere lately, from a presidential statement that promises to restore “gold standard science” from the top down because scientists have botched things, to journals are being inundated with AI-produced papers, to sleuths like Reese Richardson documenting the scale of organized scientific fraud through paper mills and collusion. In his post on this last example, Andrew wrote something that caught my attention: And, yes, typing some prompts into a chatbot and producing a paper is fraud, in the same way that publishing textbook excerpts as if it were new research is fraud, or copying from wikipedia as if it were new research is fraud, etc etc. It doesn’t require fake data and it doesn’t require some cackling Snidely Whiplash attitude. It can be some schlub sitting at a computer terminal who wants to get his contract extended or get admitted to a Ph.D. program or whose adviser is pressuring him to get some publications . . . But it’s…