Researchers are excited but apprehensive about the latest advances in artificial intelligence.
(8 Feb 2023) When Nature asked researchers about the potential uses of chatbots such as ChatGPT, particularly in science, their excitement was tempered with apprehension. “If you believe that this technology has the potential to be transformative, then I think you have to be nervous about it,” says Greene, at the University of Colorado School of Medicine in Aurora. Much will depend on how future regulations and guidelines might constrain AI chatbots’ use, researchers say.
Some researchers think LLMs are well-suited to speeding up tasks such as writing papers or grants, as long as there’s human oversight. “Scientists are not going to sit and write long introductions for grant applications any more,” says Almira Osmanovic Thunström, a neurobiologist at Sahlgrenska University Hospital in Gothenburg, Sweden, who has co-authored a manuscript2 using GPT-3 as an experiment. “They’re just going to ask systems to do that.”
Tom Tumiel, a research engineer at InstaDeep, a London-based software consultancy firm, says he uses LLMs every day as assistants to help write code. “It’s almost like a better Stack Overflow,” he says, referring to the popular community website where coders answer each others’ queries.
But researchers emphasize that LLMs are fundamentally unreliable at answering questions, sometimes generating false responses. “We need to be wary when we use these systems to produce knowledge,” says Osmanovic Thunström.
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