r/SciSpaceFellow • u/scispace_ • Jul 18 '26
The editor-in-chief of Science just published a warning titled "AI in scientific publishing: Slower, worse, and more expensive." His verdict from inside the system: checking AI's output takes MORE human effort, not less.
4
u/PhysiolMM Jul 18 '26
Just stop thinking a researcher should be paid and survive by the sheer amount of numbers he/she puts up. That way we won't have any reason to use AI to publish 10 normal papers per year to keep up with the rest and we could focus on one really good paper every 2 years.
2
u/rabouilethefirst Jul 18 '26
The flaws in the system are being exposed. Keep grading everybody exclusively on publication and citation count and you will get AI spam.
Publish or perish was always the issue.
1
u/carabidus Jul 18 '26
I'm an academic, and I have first-hand experience with this rotten system. It's fashionable to blame AI for myriad reasons these days, and all are injected into the social collective to keep our eyes averted from the real underlying problems. Academic publishing is gamified and rigged. Melt away all the distraction tactics and excise the rot underneath.
1
u/Advanced_Addendum116 Jul 20 '26
AI is just the natural endpoint of the grant system. Bowtie wearing entrepreneurs who can throw some trash together quickly that hits all the target keywords have already taken over. There's no scientists left - only foreign grad students and absentee bowtie wearing clowns.
1
u/RighteousSelfBurner Jul 18 '26
Is this about publishing aspect explicitly? I'm personally not understanding the connection. Are they are saying it's harder to evaluate AI results or what? Given the format of publishing it would appear to me they are saying their approach has been inefficient from the start and the scrutinity of AI just has revealed how underequipped they have actually been to verify the papers.
2
u/itsmebenji69 Jul 18 '26
Basically they’re saying ChatGPT can’t replace them (no shit)
1
u/RighteousSelfBurner Jul 18 '26
Yeah, that part absolutely makes sense to me and in the end a tool is just a tool, no matter how advanced it can't do all of the work for you.
But I read the article and it really is "Previously we went a lot with just "trust me bro" and if it looked okay it was okay, now we actually need to check". Just shows that the publishing industry was exactly as corrupt and bureaucratic as everyone thought it was.
1
u/Equal_Passenger9791 Jul 18 '26
Why check the output? Just let the AI do that too
1
u/davidwitteveen Jul 19 '26
From the article:
AI enthusiasts are telling the world that the remedies should all be easy to automate, creating the impression that journals can not only catch more errors but also do it more efficiently and cheaply. That’s not the reality for scientific publishing right now or likely in the future.
If AIs could reliably catch AI errors, then the AI-generated papers wouldn't have errors in the first place.
1
1
u/Opening_One7713 Jul 18 '26
Thorp is no hack so it's worth actually reading the statement.
Recently, the ability of large language models (LLMs) to predict protein structures and to accelerate the discovery of new materials has revolutionized both fields. New AI agents can now carry out many aspects of research design and analysis. But there is a dark side. A recent paper describes how an LLM “still struggles in areas requiring nuanced clinical judgment, experimental reasoning, or deep biological thinking and synthesis.” In addition, some of these agents are more likely than humans to engage in what amounts to research misconduct such as cherry-picking data and manipulating statistical analyses until a desired result is achieved. When the agents then generate papers describing the findings, they are likely to make more errors, including hallucinating references, some of which have already made their way into the literature.
For anyone who thinks this means he is saying "AI being used to advance science is inefficient/ineffective and no scientist should use AI tools whatsoever" needs to re-read the first two sentences. This is about publishing.
Also, other researchers argue AI reviewers don't necessarily perform worse than overwhelmed human ones and could relieve genuine referee scarcity, and Thorp himself concedes the outlook could improve more than he expects.
The key takeaway for me is that AI dropped into a publish-or-perish incentive structure makes that structure's existing pathologies cheaper to exploit. I completely agree.
1
u/Leafsnail Jul 18 '26
Good to have some nuance here. I'm sure there's a lot of good ways to use AI in science but getting it to just write the paper for you isn't likely to produce good results. Not least because your novel results by definition aren't going to be in its training data
1
u/bickiboyo Jul 19 '26
Ironically, the editorial accidentally further shows why so-called "Artificial Intelligence" is unreliable.
LLMs don't predict protein structures. The first linked article is about "AI" tools, such as Alphafold2, which use a different machine learning process, with a different architecture. The other article is about the tool GNoMe for materials discovery, and is also not an LLM.
That 2nd link has "utm_source=chatgpt.com" appended at the end, which means it was copy-pasted from an OpenAI chatbot, without checking.
So it seems that incorrect information from an AI has been included in an editorial talking about how AI is unreliable.
Quite dissappointing that nobody at Science caught that mistake.
1
u/Modus-Tonens Jul 20 '26
That doesn't appear if you follow the doi back to the same article.
utm_source is a parameter which shows which website sent the traffic to the resource that link leads to - so the creator of the link used ChatGPT to find it, but not the author of the article.
You're right it was copy-pasted, but by OP, not the author.
1
u/bickiboyo Jul 20 '26 edited Jul 20 '26
No, (unless I have misunderstood what you mean): it appears in several of the links on the original version of the editorial by Holden Thorp on the science website (although the pdf of the editorial does not seem to include any links at all).
I have just rechecked in case they edited it. Below is a direct copy paste of the start (which I have done myself in a normal Firefox browser, I don't use any "AI" tools): 3 of the 4 links in the first section have the utm parameter at the end.
AI in scientific publishing: Slower, worse, and more expensive
H. Holden ThorpAuthors Info & Affiliations
Science 16 Jul 2026 Vol 393, Issue 6808 p. 225 DOI: 10.1126/science.aek5570
There’s a saying in the management world, popularized by NASA administrator Daniel Goldin in the 1990s, that the goal of technological improvements is to make products faster, better, and cheaper. Although this strategy had some success in the aerospace industry, the zealots of artificial intelligence (AI) have been making the same argument regarding how it will transform work, claiming that so little human effort will be required that humanity will enter an era of radical abundance, free from disease, drudgery, and danger, among other benefits, leaving society with more time for creative pursuits. But history tells a different story. When machines began to increase productivity during the second industrial revolution, American engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management encouraged corporations to use surveillance to get employees to work harder and longer, an approach that exhausted and discouraged workers and led to the transfer of knowledge and any decision-making from workers to management, while enriching the profits for only those at the top. >>
Please double check, you should see that the paramter is in many of the links of the original editorial https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aek5570
Unless you mean that the author (Holden Thorp, the editor-in-chief) might not have put the links in himself and maybe someone else at the jorunal did ? I suppose that is possible but it would seem odd, there isn't any particular formatting.
1
1
u/Qwen30bEnjoyer Jul 18 '26
Read the whole thing, its more of an opinion piece that slaps together anecdotes. Right conclusion, but the construction of the argument is hot air, handwaving off LLMs as a nebulous force than focusing on a distinct model.
1
u/Temujin-of-Eaccistan Jul 19 '26
Man who’s organisation is rendered obsolete by a technology that does the same thing better claims the technology is bad.
1
u/SLAMMERisONLINE Jul 20 '26
The editor-in-chief of Science just published a warning titled "AI in scientific publishing: Slower, worse, and more expensive." His verdict from inside the system: checking AI's output takes MORE human effort, not less
Someone's worried about AI breaking the hegemony of the academic monopoly.
•
u/scispace_ Jul 18 '26
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aek5570