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I think it's unfortunate that they feel pushed to have a blanket policy. Not all images hold themselves out to be representative of a specific truth. If an arti
by abeppu 3y ago
I think it's unfortunate that they feel pushed to have a blanket policy. Not all images hold themselves out to be representative of a specific truth. If an article calls for an illustrative diagram of, e.g. a generic manifold representing energy associated with points in a parameter space, in context, readers should understand it as a hypothetical case whose specific attributes are not the focus, and there isn't really an opportunity to be 'misled' by it. If an article needs a microscopy image of tissue that has been treated by some factor being studied, then swapping in a DALL-E image in place of one produced through actual microscopy (and post-processing) _would_ be misleading. But the context of what the image purports to represent is critical.
- rflrob 3y agoOne thing that’s confusing is that Nature has two purposes: first as a scientific journal, and second as a science news magazine. They’re bundled in the same physical issue (though there are also branches of the journal, eg Nature Genetics, Nature Chemistry, etc), but internally handled by different staff. I suspect the policy will mostly be relevant to the news magazine side, though you would also want to ensure that a paper on the journal side doesn’t include an AI generated image in a non-AI context. I just asked DALLE for “A scientific illustration of a membrane bound protein being phosphorylated”, and while the results aren’t all that credible, I could imagine using them as a starting point.