Home Science & Technology

Will Artificial Intelligence Help or Hinder Trust in Science?

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)

New Update
Artificial Intelligence

With greater public knowledge of Artificial Intelligence (AI) will come greater public scrutiny of how it's being used by scientists. | Unsplash: Possessed Photography

Listen to this article
0.75x 1x 1.5x
00:00 / 00:00

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 mos

login-icon

The Probe: Investigative Journalism & In-Depth News Analysis

Dive into the world of The Probe, where investigative journalism meets in-depth news analysis. Explore exclusive stories, uncover hidden truths, and gain unparalleled insights into issues of public interest.