AI Writes Scientific Papers That Sound Great —But Aren ’ t Accurate

First came the students, who wanted help with their homework and essays. Now, ChatGPT is luring scientists, who are under pressure to publish papers in reputable scientific journals. AI is already disrupting the archaic world of scientific publishing. When Melissa Kacena, vice chair of orthopaedic surgery at Indiana University School of Medicine, reviews articles submitted for publication in journals, she now knows to look out for ones that might have been written by the AI program. “I have a rule of thumb now that if I pull up 10 random references cited in the paper, and if more than one isn’t accurate, then I reject the paper,” she says. [time-brightcove not-tgx=”true”] But despite the pitfalls, there is also promise. Writing review articles, for example, is a task well suited to AI: it involves sifting through the existing research on a subject, analyzing the results, reaching a conclusion about the state of the science on the topic, and providing some new insight. ChatGPT can do all of those things well. Kacena decided to see who is better at writing review articles: people or ChatGPT. For her study published in Current Osteoporosis Reports, she sorted nine students and the AI program into three groups and asked each group to write a review article on a different topic. For one group, she asked the students to write review articles on the topics; for another, she instructed ChatGPT to write articles on the same topics; and for the ...
Source: TIME: Health - Category: Consumer Health News Authors: Tags: Uncategorized healthscienceclimate Source Type: news