Artificial intelligence and illusions of understanding in scientific research

2024/03/06 by Lisa Messeri, M. J. Crockett, Molly J. Crockett · 1 voice · 6 citations
Computer Science · Social Sciences · #Ethics and Social Impacts of AI #Explainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI) #Innovation, Sustainability, Human-Machine Systems

paper · doi:10.1038/s41586-024-07146-0

crossref issued 2024/03/06 · crossref published 2024/03/06 · crossref published-online 2024/03/06 · openalex publication_date 2024/03/06 · crossref created 2024/03/06 · crossref published-print 2024/03/07 · crossref deposited 2024/11/13 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04 · crossref indexed 2026/08/04

Citations

• The Division of Cognitive Labor
• CRITICAL QUESTIONS FOR BIG DATA
• No understanding without explanation
• Statistical Modeling: The Two Cultures (with comments and a rejoinder by the author)
• The Egg and the Sperm: How Science Has Constructed a Romance Based on Stereotypical Male-Female Roles
• The misunderstood limits of folk science: an illusion of explanatory depth
• Groups of diverse problem solvers can outperform groups of high-ability problem solvers
• The seductive allure is a reductive allure: People prefer scientific explanations that contain logically irrelevant reductive information
• Prediction and explanation in social systems
• Algorithm appreciation: People prefer algorithmic to human judgment
• Making gender diversity work for scientific discovery and innovation
• To Explain or to Predict?
• Task-Dependent Algorithm Aversion
• Fast Lane to Slow Science
• Understanding, explaining, and utilizing medical artificial intelligence
• Information without knowledge: the effects of Internet search on learning
• On the Dangers of Stochastic Parrots
• Toward Causal Representation Learning
• Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective
• Automation of systematic literature reviews: A systematic literature review
• When do you trust AI? The effect of number presentation detail on consumer trust and acceptance of AI recommendations
• Listening Like a Computer: Attentional Tensions and Mechanized Care in Psychiatric Digital Phenotyping
• Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold
• Slowed canonical progress in large fields of science
• The steep cost of capture
• Atlas of AI
• Gender-diverse teams produce more novel and higher-impact scientific ideas
• Observing many researchers using the same data and hypothesis reveals a hidden universe of uncertainty
• Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time
• Out of One, Many: Using Language Models to Simulate Human Samples
• The debate over understanding in AI’s large language models
• Dynamic / ME-JEPA v2.0.0-rc1: Audited World-Model Runtime and Verified Training-Corpus Artifact
• The future of academic publishing
• Opening up ChatGPT: Tracking openness, transparency, and accountability in instruction-tuned text generators
• Scientific discovery in the age of artificial intelligence
• Psychological factors underlying attitudes toward AI tools

Cited by

• Long-Horizon Autonomous Architecture Research with a Language-Model Agent: A Behavioural Case Study
• Where did the ambiguity go? Examining how multimodal models interpret polysemous words
• CartoAgent: a multimodal large language model-powered multi-agent cartographic framework for map style transfer and evaluation
• How should the advancement of large language models affect the practice of science?
• Spurious reconstruction from brain activity
• A Tale of Open Science: Emergence of a New Normal
• Computational Hermeneutics: Evaluating generative AI as a cultural technology
• Why AI Alignment Failure Is Structural: Learned Human Interaction Structures and AGI as an Endogenous Evolutionary Shock

Discussions

• Messeri, L., Crockett, M.J. Artificial intelligence and illusions of understanding in scientific research. Nature 627, 49–58 (2024). #ai #artificialintelligence doi.org/10.1038/s415... [bsky, 0 points, 0 comments]