Happy TL;DR Tuesday! This week’s TL;DR Shorts contributor is Dr Amy Brand, Director and Publisher at MIT Press. In this episode, Amy talks about the importance of knowing whether published research can be trusted, especially as we use this knowledge to build novel research technologies such as AI and knowledge graphs.
Amy believes that AI and other novel technologies can help us build and promote trust in science – something that is needed now more than ever before. Recent years have seen a backlash against experts, leading to a social and cultural shift in engagement with research, especially science. We also live in a culture riddled with inadvertent misinformation and the persistent poison of intentional campaigns of disinformation. However, as we continue to face ever-looming global challenges, we must utilise the most trustworthy knowledge to solve them.
Unfortunately, while a lot of new technology can help us determine the credibility of research information, there are many cases in which the application of novel tech such as AI has given us cause for doubt; through hallucinations in generative AI used in research and discovery, through to the limitations of an AI-driven peer-review process that doubles down on existing biases hidden within the training data used to build these programs.
Amy believes that by having complete transparency of the provenance of research information, architects of new technology and their users can better understand what underlies the information used to create it and build better and more appropriate tools that can be trusted, which can, in turn, help us develop new breakthroughs and discoveries in a trustworthy manner.
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