AI or a scientist? To whom should I address my questions?

For the past few years, we all have been bombarded with the importance of artificial intelligence (AI) in our lives and truth must be told, many times we did find AI impressively useful. But there is a very thin line limiting AI usefulness and dangerousness.

Let’s start with basic concepts. What’s intelligence and how can we define it? Accordingly to, Oxford language is “the ability to acquire and apply knowledge and skills”. A very simple definition that does not completely represent intelligence, why? Because intelligence requires understanding of a situation, judgment, and emotions.

Artificial intelligence simulates the human thinking through computer systems, quit fascinating except that it is unable to understand a situation completely, due to the lack of emotion, critical thinking and living experience.

We all have somehow been victims of information manipulation; we all saw people believing in outrages posts in social media, but we could easily show them the truth by giving the access to trustworthy information. Now, finding reliable information is the hard part because somehow along the past few years AI corrupted people, by giving them tools to create whatever they wanted and making it so real that it’s almost impossible to believe it is not true. We saw that with AI generated images, books and even songs.

Let me tell you, I wasn’t ready to see the same happening in the scientific world. Students using this tool to make all their works where the citation seem real but don’t exist was shocking, but nothing prepared me for what was about to come. Cheating in a university work is one thing and by itself is bad enough, but having scientists doing the same thing, that’s when the sirens should go off.

On 13th February, Frontiers in Cell and Developmental Biology (IF 5.5; high impact) published an article that made use of AI generated images that made no sense, yet it passed revision and was published being retracted only 3 days later.

It’s hard enough to fight against disinformation but is harder when it comes from the scientific community itself. Is this the example we want to give to our young generations? Money is more important than information? Where is our critical thinking?

No machine can replace us, intelligence is more than just doing things by the book, is our emotions, our points of view, is the way we deal with the information that was given to us that makes the world evolve. Using such tools in this area might give you the easy fix, but if you think you are smarter than the rest let me tell you, you are not that smart or intelligent.

Don’t get me wrong, I can assure you some AI tools were used in this text. It’s great when it corrects my gramma, but it’s awful when it makes a cell look like a sliced orange.

Joana Costa