MIT says that as a result of issues concerning the “integrity” of a high-profile paper concerning the results of synthetic intelligence on analysis and innovation, the paper needs to be “withdrawn from public discourse.”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 indicate that the introduction of an AI device 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 lowering researchers’ satisfaction with their work.
MIT economists Daron Acemoglu (who lately received the Nobel Prize) and David Autor each praised the paper final 12 months, with Autor telling the Wall Road 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 stated they now have “no confidence within the provenance, reliability or validity of the info and within the veracity of the analysis.”
In line with 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 inside evaluate.
MIT says that as a result of pupil privateness legal guidelines, it can not disclose the outcomes of that evaluate, however the paper’s writer is “now not at MIT.” And whereas the college’s announcement doesn’t identify the writer, each a preprint model of the paper and the preliminary press protection determine 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MIT additionally says it has requested the paper be withdrawn from The Quarterly Journal of Economics, the place it was submitted for publication, and from the preprint web site arXiv.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 carried out so.”