alt Hacker NewsScientific research is suffering from a reproducibility crisis. Not a publication crisis. LLM's aren't going to solve reproducibility issues.
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I'm actually quite excited for when (if) the models get good enough to start replicating compsci papers. I'd love it if there was a system which calculated a reproducibility score per-lab or per-researcher, which I could look up alongside their citation count.
I want to see who did the hard work properly, and who focused on publishing with concealed details.
The two feed into each other. "Publish or perish" ups the incentive to pump out shaky papers to pad resumes. LLMs make it easier to churn them out.
Underlying reproducibility is integrity.
Underlying integrity is rigor.
Underlying rigor is education.
It goes deep, for sure, IMO.
It seems to me that LLM's could massively improve reproducibility issues if journals would require that the papers be reproducible by model X using a standardized prompt in < N minutes, etc...
it's suffering from having 1 million researchers, when there aren't 1 million important easy problems to solve, yet you must publish something
it could also be said that scientific interpretation is suffering from a framework crisis. the scientific convention of experiment, is the test of an hypothesis, as a logical construct.
repetition of materials and methods toward reproducibility, holds far less wieght than multiple variants of process designed to test a common hypothesis resulting in agreement.[null, or failure to null]
Por que no los dos? Scientific review times are up, it’s harder to find reviewers, and many reviews are AI generated anyway. Auto-generated research publications will arguably make the replication crisis worse, because there will be more slop to clog up the review system, and these papers will presumably be just as (if not more) not reproducible than human written science
In some fields like comp sci, when code isn't given but the paper describes the approach, LLMs do help with the reproducibility crisis: you can ask it to reproduce the result through reimplementation by reading the paper.
If it fails you may have to double check it did properly reimplement it, but if it succeeds you do get a reproduction.
They are going to make it a thousands times worse.
It wasn't perfect before, but it at least took some time to fake a paper. The problem is now people can produce a very plausible looking completely fake paper in minutes. Peer review is in the process of completely collapsing, in fact I think it's already basically done.
The only way this might fix things is if we require all papers are completely reproducable (that doesn't help in subjects like biology of course. They can still provide all the experimental data in the rawest format possible which doesn't break any laws).