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Garbage in, garbage out: mitigating risks and maximizing benefits of AI in research

Artificial-intelligence tools are transforming data-driven science — better ethical standards and more robust data curation are needed to fuel the boom and prevent a bust.
  1. Brooks Hanson

    1. Brooks Hanson is retired executive vice-president for science at the American Geophysical Union, Washington DC, USA.

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  2. Shelley Stall

    1. Shelley Stall is vice-president of Open Science Leadership at the American Geophysical Union, Washington DC, USA.

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  3. Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld

    1. Joel Cutcher-Gershenfeld is the Florence G. Heller Professor and director of the Social Impact MBA in the Heller School for Social Policy and Management at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts.

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  4. Kristina Vrouwenvelder

    1. Kristina Vrouwenvelder is program manager of Open Science at the American Geophysical Union, Washington DC.

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  5. Christopher Wirz

    1. Christopher Wirz is a project scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), Boulder, Colorado, USA.

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  6. Yuhan (Douglas) Rao

    1. Yuhan (Douglas) Rao is a research scholar at the North Carolina Institute for Climate Studies, North Carolina State University, Asheville, North Carolina, USA.

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  7. Ge Peng

    1. Ge Peng is a senior principal research scientist at the Earth System Science Center/NASA MSFC IMPACT, The University of Alabama in Huntsville, Huntsville, Alabama, USA.

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Science is producing data in amounts so large as to be unfathomable. Advances in artificial intelligence (AI) are increasingly needed to make sense of all this information (see ref. 1 and Nature Rev. Phys. 4, 353; 2022). For example, through training on copious quantities of data, machine-learning (ML) methods get better at finding patterns without being explicitly programmed to do so.

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Nature 623, 28-31 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03316-8

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Competing Interests

B.H. serves as a volunteer on the Advisory Board for Dryad, a generalist repository that provides curation.

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