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Is AI leading to a reproducibility crisis in science?

Scientists worry that ill-informed use of artificial intelligence is driving a deluge of unreliable or useless research.
  1. Philip Ball

    1. Philip Ball is a science writer in London and former physics editor of Nature.

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Cartoon of a bottle with a label saying "Artificial Intelligence Cures All".

Illustration by Adrià Voltà

During the COVID-19 pandemic in late 2020, testing kits for the viral infection were scant in some countries. So the idea of diagnosing infection with a medical technique that was already widespread — chest X-rays — sounded appealing. Although the human eye can’t reliably discern differences between infected and non-infected individuals, a team in India reported that artificial intelligence (AI) could do it, using machine learning to analyse a set of X-ray images1.

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Nature 624, 22-25 (2023)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03817-6

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