Generative AI and the Future of Research Speaker Series: Sayash Kapoor

Sayash Kapoor is a CS PhD candidate at Princeton, a Senior Fellow at Mozilla, and a Laurance S. Rockefeller Graduate Prize Fellow in the University Center for Human Values. He is a coauthor of AI Snake Oil, one of Nature’s 10 best books of 2024. He has written for outlets like WIRED and The Wall Street Journal, and his work has been featured in The New York Times, The Atlantic, Washington Post, Bloomberg, and many others. Kapoor has been recognized with various awards, including a best paper award at ACM FAccT, an impact recognition award at ACM CSCW, and inclusion in TIME’s inaugural list of the 100 most influential people in AI.

Abstract:
The promise of AI has led to its rapid adoption across scientific fields. Companies have even promised to build AI agents that can automate all of science. In this talk, I will go over three reasons to temper the hype around AI use in automating science. First, existing AI adoption has been plagued by severe reproducibility failures that lead to overoptimistic results across dozens of fields. Second, while AI has been claimed to automate all of science, recent empirical work shows that current models fall well short of accomplishing far simpler tasks, such as reproducing a paper’s results even when the code and data are provided. Still, research tools like those for automating reproducibility are a promising avenue for improving the quality of scientific outputs. Third, even if AI can solve specific scientific tasks to help improve the quality of research, the far harder task is updating scientific epistemologies. While AI could play a meaninful role in improving scientific research, the uncritical embrace of AI risks undermining rather than advancing scientific progress. 

About the speaker series:
The CIRSS Speaker Series continues in Spring with a new theme of “Generative A and the Future of Research.” Our speakers will share their research on the opportunities and risks associated with the rapidly evolving landscape of generative AI usage in scholarship.

We meet most Wednesdays, 9am-10am Central time, in Zoom. Everyone is welcome to attend. More information, including upcoming speaker schedule and links to recordings, is available on the series website. For weekly updates on upcoming talks, subscribe to our CIRSS Seminars mailing list. Our Spring series is led by Yuanxi Fu and Timothy McPhillips, and supported by the Center for Informatics Research in Science and Scholarship (CIRSS) and the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.