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Can LLMs replace Neil deGrasse Tyson? Evaluating the Reliability of LLMs as Science Communicators

2024/09/21 by Prasoon Bajpai, Bajpai, Prasoon, Chatterjee, Niladri +4 · 1 citation
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Biomedical Text Mining and Ontologies #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2409.14037

openalex publication_date 2024/09/21 · openalex created_date 2024/10/26 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

Large Language Models (LLMs) and AI assistants driven by these models are experiencing exponential growth in usage among both expert and amateur users. In this work, we focus on evaluating the reliability of current LLMs as science communicators. Unlike existing benchmarks, our approach emphasizes assessing these models on scientific questionanswering tasks that require a nuanced understanding and awareness of answerability. We introduce a novel dataset, SCiPS-QA, comprising 742 Yes/No queries embedded in complex scientific concepts, along with a benchmarking suite that evaluates LLMs for correctness and consistency across various criteria. We benchmark three proprietary LLMs from the OpenAI GPT family and 13 open-access LLMs from the Meta Llama-2, Llama-3, and Mistral families. While most open-access models significantly underperform compared to GPT-4 Turbo, our experiments identify Llama-3-70B as a strong competitor, often surpassing GPT-4 Turbo in various evaluation aspects. We also find that even the GPT models exhibit a general incompetence in reliably verifying LLM responses. Moreover, we observe an alarming trend where human evaluators are deceived by incorrect responses from GPT-4 Turbo.

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