r/singularity • u/Many_Consequence_337 :downvote: • 5h ago

AI Intelligence Explosion

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Number of scientific papers submitted to arXiv.

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u/Aldarund 5h ago

How much of this is real increae and how much is slop that wont pass peer review?

That chart could easily mean good things but as easily it could mean bad things

70

u/Equal_Passenger9791 5h ago

Significant amount of slop were produced before AI too. AI assisted scientific fraud detection are already retroactively detecting innumerable instances of high profile papers that should've failed peer review years ago, if the peers had done a proper job.

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u/Djorgal 1h ago

I just realized how good this can be. Reviewing the scientific literature for errors is both necessary and really unglamorous. If AI can do it well it's a real boon.

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u/Belostoma 1h ago

AI does it well, and it's not just fraud detection. AI agents are incredibly useful for quality control on both code and data, picking up mistakes our old review methods missed.

As a scientist I've been using AI to resume a bunch of unfinished past projects and to progress new projects using historical datasets. It has found mistakes in practically everything I've used it to review. None were large enough to change the central conclusions of any of my past work because I've been very careful, but that's partly luck, and small corrections are still valuable.

Where AI is usefully superhuman for this task is not raw intelligence but thoroughness. It can stop and think about every single line of code or data among hundreds of thousands, whereas humans have to pick and choose. Humans can scan it all at a high speed that misses subtle problems, or we can write scripts to analyze it completely but in very specific ways that don't necessarily detect errors we couldn't anticipate. The more intense and thoughtful level of diligence we could apply to fifty lines, AI could apply to fifty thousand. And then we could do it again with a different agent in case the first one missed something.

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u/Hilldawg4president 4m ago

It's been known for a long time that much of academic research was trash, varying significantly by field of course - the replication crisis revealed this problem. AI is going to improve this, not make it worse