How language-generation AIs could transform science

Shobita Parthasarathy says that LLMs could help to advance research, but their use should be regulated. Machine-learning algorithms that generate fluent language from vast amounts of text could change how science is done -- but not necessarily for the better, says Shobita Parthasarathy, a specialist in the governance of emerging technologies at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. In a report published on 27 April, Parthasarathy and other researchers try to anticipate societal impacts of emerging artificial-intelligence (AI) technologies called large language models (LLMs). These can churn out astonishingly convincing prose, translate between languages, answer questions and even produce code. The corporations building them -- including Google, Facebook and Microsoft -- aim to use them in chatbots and search engines, and to summarize documents. They sometimes parrot errors or problematic stereotypes in the millions or billions of documents they're trained on.