Post #1581551

We're doing ourselves a massive disservice by having an "no-AI no matter what" attitude. LLMs and other Deep Learning models are doing advancements in science every other day. For a group of people that usually embraces scientific progress (Mastodon), I find the community here very dogmatic and against science if it comes from AI-assisted work. I get it, there's a lot of slop that flooded the academic community. There also were big issues with the scientific community before AI: lack of funding for replication studies, publication bias, the file drawer problem, where studies which fail to reject the null hypothesis are less likely to be published than those that do produce a statistically significant result. Oh the other hand, AlphaFold is pushing the boundaries of protein folding, MatterGen is producing many DFT-stable, database-novel crystal structures, LLMs continue to solve Erdos problems. And there are open alternatives we should champion: OpenFold is attempting a permissive replication of AlphaFold 2, for example. "But muh AI is fascism" - very Ameri-brained take, decentre yourself and fix your country, you can't lock the entire world out of scientific progress because you live in a failed state. "But muh stealing work" - you're literally arguing JSTOR and Elsevier's point against Aaron Swarz "But muh energy use" - shunning indie Devs that try to improve AI efficiency basically guarantees capture of AI by big players that can afford to just scale more instead of invest in better, post-transformer architecture. I see the cynical view of AI displayed here as masking intellectual laziness, and I think it's frankly dishonest to our communities (that, if we want to still consider ourselves champions of scientific progress). #noai #ai #llm #science #publications