MIT says that on account of considerations in regards to the “integrity” of a high-profile paper in regards to the results of synthetic intelligence on analysis and innovation, the paper needs to be “withdrawn from public discourse.”
The paper in query, “Synthetic Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Product Innovation,” was written by a doctoral pupil within the college’s economics program. It claimed to point out 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 lately received the Nobel Prize) and David Autor each praised the paper final yr, with Autor telling the Wall Avenue Journal he was “floored.” In a press release included in MIT’s announcement on Friday, Acemoglu and Autor described the paper as “already identified and mentioned extensively within the literature on AI and science, though it has not been revealed 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.”
In response to the WSJ, a pc scientist with expertise in supplies science approached Acemoglu and Autor with considerations in January. They introduced these considerations to MIT, resulting in an inner overview.
MIT says that on account of pupil privateness legal guidelines, it can’t disclose the outcomes of that overview, however the paper’s writer is “now not at MIT.” And whereas the college’s announcement doesn’t title the writer, each a preprint model of the paper and the preliminary press protection establish him 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MIT additionally says it has requested the paper be withdrawn from The Quarterly Journal of Economics, the place it was submitted for publication, and from the preprint web site arXiv.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 purported to submit arXiv withdrawal requests, however MIT says “up to now, the writer has not accomplished so.”
