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MIT says that due to concerns about the \u201cintegrity\u201d of a high-profile paper about the effects of artificial intelligence on the productivity of a materials science lab, the paper should be \u201cwithdrawn from public discourse.\u201d<\/p>\n
The paper in question, \u201cArtificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Product Innovation,\u201d was written by a doctoral student in the university\u2019s economics program. It claimed to show that the introduction of an AI tool into a large-but-unidentified materials science lab led to the discovery of more materials and more patent filings, but at the cost of reducing researchers\u2019 satisfaction with their work.<\/p>\n
MIT economists Daron Acemoglu (who recently won the Nobel Prize<\/a>) and David Autor both praised the paper last year, with Autor telling the Wall Street Journal<\/a> he was \u201cfloored.\u201d In a statement included in MIT\u2019s announcement<\/a> on Friday, Acemoglu and Autor described the paper as \u201calready known and discussed extensively in the literature on AI and science, even though it has not been published in any refereed journal.\u201d<\/p>\n However, the two economists said they now have \u201cno confidence in the provenance, reliability or validity of the data and in the veracity of the research.\u201d<\/p>\n According to the WSJ<\/a>, a computer scientist with experience in materials science approached Acemoglu and Autor with concerns in January. They brought those concerns to MIT, leading to an internal review.<\/p>\n MIT says that due to student privacy laws, it cannot disclose the results of that review, but the paper\u2019s author is \u201cno longer at MIT.\u201d And while the university\u2019s announcement does not name the student, both a preprint version of the paper<\/a> and the initial press coverage identify the author as Aidan Toner-Rodgers. (TechCrunch has reached out to Toner-Rodgers for comment.)<\/p>\n MIT also says it has requested the paper be withdrawn from The Quarterly Journal of Economics, where it was submitted for publication, and from the preprint website arXiv. Apparently, arXiv withdrawal requests are only supposed to come from a paper\u2019s authors, but MIT says \u201cto date, the author has not done so.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n