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At least one nice side-effect of this could be that only reproducible research with code provided will matter in the future (this should already be the case but
by lairv 4y ago
At least one nice side-effect of this could be that only reproducible research with code provided will matter in the future (this should already be the case but for some reason isn't yet). What's the point of trusting a paper without code if ChatGPT can produce 10 such papers with fake results in less than a second
- ben_w 4y agoChatGPT can produce code too. Therefore I think this may call for something more extreme — at risk of demonstrating my own naïveté about modern science, perhaps only allowing publication after replication, rather than after peer-review?
- lairv 4y agoIdeally yes, for a paper to be accepted it should be reproduced, if ChatGPT is ever able to produce code that runs and produce SOTA results then I guess we won't need researchers anymore There is however a problem when the contents of the papers costs thousands/millions of $ to be reproduced (think GPT3, DALLE, and most of the papers coming Google, OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft). More than replication, it would require fully open science where all the experiments and results of a paper are publicly available, but I doubt tech companies will agree with that. Ultimately it could also end up with researchers only trusting papers coming from known labs/people/companies
- jacquesm 4y agoNot all science results in 'code'.
- lairv 4y agoIndeed and other sciences seems even harder to reproduce/verify (e.g. how can mathematicians efficiently verify results if chatgpt can produce thousands of wrong proofs)
- ben_w 4y agoMathematicians have it easier than most, there are already ways to automate testing in their domain. Kinda needed to be, given the rise of computer-generated proofs starting with the 4-colour theorem in 1976.
- lairv 4y ago> there are already ways to automate testing in their domain. Do you mean proof assistant like Lean ? From my limited knowledge of fundamental math research, I thought most math publications these days only provide a paper with statements and proofs, but not with a standardized format
- ben_w 4y agoI can't give many specifics, my knowledge is YouTube mathematicians like 3blue1brown and Matt Parker taking about things like this.
- mkl 4y agoOnly a tiny fraction of existing maths can be done with proof assistants currently, and as a result very very few papers use them. In most current research automated testing would be impossible or orders of magnitude more work; in many areas mathematicians are working with things centuries ahead of where proof assistants are up to, and working at a much higher level of abstraction. Also, many maths papers have important content that is not proofs (and many applied maths papers contain no proofs at all).
- ben_w 4y agoI'm thinking of the LHC or the JWST: billions of dollars for an essentially unique instrument, though each produces far more than one paper. Code from ChatGPT could very well end up processing data from each of them — I wouldn't be surprised if it already has, albeit in the form of a researcher playing around with the AI to see if it was any use.
- PeterisP 4y agoReproduction of experiments generally comes after publication, not before acceptance. Reviewers of a paper would review the analysis of the data, and whether the conclusions are reasonable given the data, but no one would expect a reviewer to replicate a chemical experiment, or the biopsy of some mice, or re-do a sociological survey or repeat observation of some astronomy phenomenon, or any other experimental setup. Reviewers work from an assumption that the data is valid, and reproduction (or failed reproduction) of a paper happens as part of the scientific discourse after the paper is accepted and published.