Comment by timster6442
9 hours ago
I'm in academia (biology but highly computational) and I would say opinions on AI are quite polarized. Some professors in the department equate not using AI as lost productivity. Contrarily some professors abhor the idea of even using AI at all. For us (biologists) it's less of an issue because we have no fear of openai or A/ publishing a biology paper. Though even people I known in physics, data science, or computer science still heavily use AI.
Our university has agreements that stipulate that our institutional accounts cannot be used to train AI models and certain research groups have differential model access.
Further from academic journal sense there is mixed feelings. I once was able to meet with a senior journal editor (general non-medical high IF journal > 50) who claimed that if they think something is written by AI they wouldn't consider it. Yet another high IF journal said it was completely fine if something was written by AI. About a month ago I reviewed a paper by yet a different high IF journal and in big bold red letters it said I was not allowed to feed any part of the paper through AI (even if it was locally ran) but you could ask it to rephrase text that you wrote.
Do you mind me asking why you have no fear of OpenAI etc publishing a biology paper? With increasing model capability and compatibility with lab hardware could we not be in a scenario soon(ish) where these agents are able to autonomously complete and publish experimental results?
I was debating this with a friend the other day and the consensus we came to was that a highly trained scientist would (or should) always review output like that described above, but that's starting to feel like a weakening argument!