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I would have thought scientists weren’t going to use these tools to do research considering they as a group are far more exposed to things like peer reviews and critical thinking than general society. What worries me the most about these AI solutions, however, is their usage in the public sector. They can certainly be useful helpers, like, they can scan images for cancer and if added to existing processes involving humans, often lead to enhanced results. They can’t replace any existing methods, however, as we learned here in Denmark a few years ago. Unfortunately that lesson hasn’t been learned across the public sector. I think medicine and healthcare learned it, but right now, we’re replacing actual human controls, audits and sometimes decision making with AI or an unwarranted trust in AI results. Which is going to lead to some really terrible results considering how bad things like LLMs often are at being lucky in even “common knowledge” situations. It’s further enhanced by how some of the work it’s tasked to do isn’t as black-and-white as writing code is. We use AI tools in our daily work, and they are ok, but as anyone who’s used them for programming probably knows by now, they aren’t exactly great at being lucky. Sometimes they’ll hallucinate solutions that simply do not exist. This is how they work, and as I said earlier, AIs can be great enhancers. They aren’t replacements though, and if we start treating them like they are, which is very tempting from a change-management and benefit-realisation perspective, we’re just going to get in trouble. This is unfortunately exactly what we’re doing, and why wouldn’t we? Most western public sectors have functioned on at least some form of new public management for two decades by now, sometimes longer. As a result the entire systemic culture is geared toward efficiency and cost reduction, even when it doesn’t really result in either efficiency and cost reduction on a broader perspective. Now, if scientists are on board. Then what hope does a public bureaucracy have? |