AI Chat GPT research summaries fool even expert scientists

AI Chat GPT summaries fool even expert scientists
Credit: Pixabay/ Alexandra Koch

An artificial-intelligence (AI) chatbot can write such convincing fake research-paper abstracts that scientists are often unable to spot them, according to a preprint posted on the bioRxiv server in late December. Researchers are divided over the implications for science.

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The chatbot, ChatGPT, creates realistic and intelligent-sounding text in response to user prompts. It is a ‘large language model’, a system based on neural networks that learn to perform a task by digesting huge amounts of existing human-generated text.

The AI-output detector spotted 66% of the generated abstracts. But the human reviewers didn’t do much better: they correctly identified only 68% of the generated abstracts and 86% of the genuine abstracts. They incorrectly identified 32% of the generated abstracts as being real and 14% of the genuine abstracts as being generated.

“ChatGPT writes believable scientific abstracts,” said [Catherine] Gao and colleagues in the preprint. “The boundaries of ethical and acceptable use of large language models to help scientific writing remain to be determined.”

[Expert Sandra] Wachter says that, if scientists can’t determine whether research is true, there could be “dire consequences”. As well as being problematic for researchers, who could be pulled down flawed routes of investigation, because the research they are reading has been fabricated, there are “implications for society at large because scientific research plays such a huge role in our society”.

This is an excerpt. Read the full article here

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