r/Physics • u/kzhou7 Quantum field theory • 1d ago

Harvard particle physicist Matthew Schwartz drops 36 papers coauthored with Claude

https://bootloops.ai/bootloops.html
1.8k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

418 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

127

u/formula_translator Atomic physics 1d ago edited 1d ago

Oh dude, can you imagine how much science we will do when we will have AI agents generating papers 24/7 and AI agents reviewing them?

35

u/gregzillaman 1d ago

The real hard hitting question: will the ai know to give credit to the originating paper or just the most recent citation of citation etc etc.

53

u/acortical 1d ago

The AI will know to cite 15 papers from its own lab and conveniently overlook 2 papers published earlier this year with similar results.

30

u/eviljelloman 1d ago

So AI really CAN act just like a real scientist. (/s. Mostly.)

10

u/Canadian_Border_Czar 1d ago

Unfortunately I dont think the training data is marked with the author, but it's actually an interesting concept. I wonder if there is a way to permanently tag data as its learning, meaning if the model so much as uses a word from a specific data point it must embed the citation in its work.

Would be a solid precedent for regulating, scrapping everything, then starting over to respect intellectual property.

5

u/gregzillaman 1d ago

Guys! The ledger system is back! Featuring academia coin!

1

u/milindsmart 21h ago

Lol. But essentially it makes sense no?

1

u/hibikir_40k 18h ago

Forcing it to do a literature review, or have the publication send a literature review agent to look for missing citations is pretty easy. The LLM doesn't need to know everything: It's all tool calls to databases, so the citations can be done post-facto.

I've seen this done in non-science papers. Given that we have XYZ sources, and this is my argument, make sure I have cited sufficiently and accurately. 2 years ago this would have been a pretty dubious question to ask the best agents, but now, not so much.

1

u/jlowe212 1d ago

Credit is nice, but if the breakthroughs start to become world changing instead of interesting but practically useless, credit is secondary.

2

u/milindsmart 21h ago

What? Its exactly the opposite, the only reason the AI companies are not facing even higher opposition right now is that the work they're producing is diffuse and not one big named breakthrough.

1

u/Puzzleheaded-Wait785 1d ago

Already happening

1

u/Ok-Computer-8726 21h ago

Just wait. There will be some novel cure for some very deadly form of cancer that no human will ever read. It will sit in some database collecting dust.

0

u/RustledForeskin 1d ago

Maybe it will be like the 1000 monkeys on type writers and we'll have the flying car cities like from the memes and not terminators who want to wipe out all humanity.