MIT says that on account of issues in regards to the “integrity” of a high-profile paper on the consequences of synthetic intelligence on the productiveness of a supplies science lab, the paper ought to be “withdrawn from public discourse.”
The paper in query, “Synthetic Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Product Innovation,” was written by a doctoral scholar within the college’s economics program. It claimed to indicate that the introduction of an AI instrument right into a large-but-unidentified supplies science lab led to the invention of extra supplies and extra patent filings, however at the price of decreasing researchers’ satisfaction with their work.
MIT economists Daron Acemoglu (who just lately won the Nobel Prize) and David Autor each praised the paper final 12 months, with Autor telling the Wall Street Journal he was “floored.” In a press release included in MIT’s announcement on Friday, Acemoglu and Autor described the paper as “already recognized and mentioned extensively within the literature on AI and science, though it has not been printed in any refereed journal.”
Nonetheless, the 2 economists mentioned they now have “no confidence within the provenance, reliability or validity of the information and within the veracity of the analysis.”
According to the WSJ, a pc scientist with expertise in supplies science approached Acemoglu and Autor with issues in January. They introduced these issues to MIT, resulting in an inner evaluate.
MIT says that on account of scholar privateness legal guidelines, it can not disclose the outcomes of that evaluate, however the paper’s creator is “not at MIT.” And whereas the college’s announcement doesn’t identify the scholar, each a preprint version of the paper and the preliminary press protection determine the creator as Aidan Toner-Rodgers. (TechCrunch has reached out to Toner-Rodgers for remark.)
MIT additionally says it has requested the paper be withdrawn from The Quarterly Journal of Economics, the place it was submitted for publication, and from the preprint web site arXiv. Apparently solely a paper’s authors are in a position to submit arXiv withdrawal requests, however MIT says “to this point, the creator has not executed so.”