AI being used to churn out deluge of dodgy scientific research
Easy access to artificial intelligence (AI) has made medical and health research less scientifically rigorous and has facilitated a "flood" of shoddy journal papers full of superficial analyses based on "cherry-picked" data, a new study reports.
According to the University of Surrey and University of Aberystwyth, leaning on AI leads to the "production of large numbers of formulaic single-factor analyses" when a broader approach would likely better assess the range of possible causes of diseases.
Gosh it's horrifying if AI really is responsible for the "production of large numbers of formulaic single-factor analyses."
From which sources did it scrape that approach? Surely not from the scientific sources behind thousands and thousands of mainstream media stories all over the developed world?
Whatever next?
Net Zero?
8 comments:
Does an AI entity (I do not know the proper name) have lots of AI buddies to peer assess the quality of its cogitations? And are there grants of "real " money, sorry, funding, for such research?
And is Surkier actually a real being, and not some AI CGI simulacrum, that cannot remember if it needs specs or not? And is still waiting on the "charisma" service pack update, once some techie software nerd can define "charisma". Bit like a blind mouse trying to define an elephant.
AI is going to be so radically different from groupthink.
I don't know about actual research, but my news feed is deluged with pop-science summaries which are clearly AI generated, and they home in on anything I've searched for. And of course, those summaries are going to form the material for the next wave.
My guess is that we are heading for a new dark age of bland, generalised superstition. And a priestly caste of AI experts who claim they can get at the real truth.
Doonhamer - I don't think Surkier is a real being because of all the problems with the "charisma" service pack update. Each update breaks something else such as the "cliché avoidance package" which keeps going on about "plan for change" when it should be cracking original jokes.
Tammly - it could make groupthink worse in that it doesn't even evolve.
Sam - fortunately blogs are not yet affected so we can Discover Tesco online food shopping and great value groceries, plus earn Clubcard points.
"“It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as editor of The New England Journal of Medicine” (1).
More recently, Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet, wrote that “The case against science is straightforward: much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue. Afflicted by studies with small sample sizes, tiny effects, invalid exploratory analyses, and flagrant conflicts of interest, together with an obsession for pursuing fashionable trends of dubious importance, science has taken a turn towards darkness” (2).
The first of these two commentaries on clinical research publications appeared in 2009, the second in April of this year [2015]"
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC4572812/
dearieme - thanks for the link, I've bookmarked it for a future post. It's surprising, or maybe it isn't surprising, but stories such as this never seem to make it into the wider public perception of medical science.
The Covid hysteria/shambles/corruption shows that the two sceptics were right. Indeed perhaps underestimated the problem.
dearieme - yes it does. Maybe it even made politicians more wary.
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