[seydor]

brainstorming for research fields that don't have substantial review papers / wiki pages

How i know: I tried it. It is discovery of citations and ideas you might not be aware of. Also a lot of garbage, but any scientist worth her salt can weed that out. It's the best thing to happen since google scholar and scihub

[tsimionescu]

How would a system that generates false information (especially likely for fields that are not well represented in the training set, based on the site) help with brainstorming for practitioners in that field?

[seydor]

This wasnt meant to generate valid scientific papers, and Lecun said so too. It generates interesting associations. It rambles sometimes and goes on tangents that are sometimes relevant sometimes not. It can inform you of related ideas that you were not aware of. It's like a fuzzy google scholar. It is in no way valid publishable research, but it's like a bicycle for researchers.

At least that was what i managed to find out for the brief time i toyed with it. This can save time instead of hunting down loads of citation trails.

What I really fail to see is what is wrong with having this buggy tool.

(Also, if you think that published papers contain true information, you should invest in my bridge)

[tsimionescu]

As far as I understand (and reading their Limitations page also), the system is quite likely to simply invent facts, particularly in niche fields - which may well mislead you and lead on a wild goose chase.

[seydor]

Yes , and that's great. Science is about inventing ideas and testing them, it's literally about chasing wild geese.

A typical scientific review paper or perspective contains tons of such speculation. But right now the process of hunting down citations is excruciating and most often done lazily. Even the best review papers contain erroneous citations to irrelevant papers, or improperly cited results , papers etc. Peer review can only do so much. This is why this tool is useful, it accelerates those things. It's not like anyone will cite Galactica.org

[UncleMeat]

> Yes , and that's great. Science is about inventing ideas and testing them, it's literally about chasing wild geese.

There are an infinity of ideas we can test. The large majority of them are either obviously wrong or completely useless. The reason why researchers spend so much time embedded in a field is to enable them to come up with ideas that are more likely to be worth investigating than another idea.

And again, if the goal is to generate hypotheses then the output should be a hypothesis - not a paper that presents the hypothesis and claims to evaluate it.

[dmix]

If you're a) believing the output wholesale or b) not occasionally going down random rabbit holes to explore new ideas (even ones that seemed silly or wasteful on the surface) you're probably doing something wrong as it is.

[UncleMeat]

If the purpose is to generate interesting associations, why is the output a paper? Why not a graph showing overlapping subfields worth investigating or relationships between papers via citations and shared ideas?

Is it really a surprise that people have a different reaction to machine generated scientific papers that contain a large amount of plain nonsense than they do to a machine generated piece of art?