[jwuphysics]

> The idea that AI might transform scientific practice is therefore feasible. But the main barrier is sociological: it can happen only if human scientists are willing and able to use such tools.

As a tenure-track scientist who works in ML applications for astrophysics, I disagree with this sentiment. The main issue isn't that enough scientists are using tools to search through literature or form new hypotheses, the main issue is that scientists now have to validate and sift through AI-generated outputs in order to find useful signals, rather than validate and sift through experimentally derived or observed signals.

AI can be useful for hypothesis generation in my field [0], and I think that there are lots of great use cases where it can be used to summarize information. However, it always comes with the possibility that it might output complete nonsense [1], so scientists who adopt these tools will have to spend some of their time verifying their outputs.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.11648

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20230913230733/https://www.msn.c...