Science has always relied on a curious human\u2019s mind forming a hypothesis, designing an experiment, analyzing the results and presenting the case to that person\u2019s peers. Over centuries, we\u2019ve built better tools such as electron microscopes, particle accelerators and supercomputers, but the core loop of scientific discovery has remained stubbornly human. Now, for the first time, that loop has started with a new kind of mind.<\/p>\n
So far, scientists have often had artificial intelligence help them with solving a predefined, narrow task such as folding proteins, says Jeff Clune, a professor of computer science at the University of British Columbia. \u201cWe\u2019re saying the AI gets to be the scientist,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n
In a recent Nature study<\/a>, Clune and his colleagues unveiled the AI Scientist, an AI system that wrote a paper without human involvement that passed peer review for a workshop at the 2025 International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR), a top-tier venue in the field of machine learning. The paper was mediocre, according to Clune and other experts. But its existence marks a turning point that the scientific community is only beginning to grapple with: AI has quickly moved from assisting scientists to attempting to be one<\/a>.<\/p>\n On supporting science journalism<\/p>\n If you’re enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing<\/a>. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.<\/p>\n The AI Scientist comprises multiple modules. After it is given a general topic prompt by researchers, it surveys available literature and generates hypotheses. \u201cWe\u2019re just giving it a general direction like \u2018Come up with something interesting to study on how the AI learns,\u2019\u201d Clune explains. The system then evaluates and refines those ideas, filtering out any that are not novel. From there, further modules plan and execute experiments, analyze and plot the data and, finally, write the paper. It even does its own internal peer review process to find flaws in its papers, Clune says. (The system relies on existing foundation models such as Anthropic\u2019s Claude Sonnet or OpenAI\u2019s GPT-4o; the team\u2019s contribution is the pipeline orchestrating these models).<\/p>\n To see if The AI Scientist\u2019s output could meet human standards, the team submitted three papers generated by it to the I Can\u2019t Believe It\u2019s Not Better (ICBINB) workshop at the 2025 ICLR. One was accepted. (The conference organizers gave their permission for the AI-generated papers to be submitted, and all of the AI Scientist\u2019s papers were withdrawn from the conference after the review process.)<\/p>\n The team behind the AI Scientist admits the bar for this workshop was lower than that of a main conference publication. \u201cWould a mediocre graduate student get one paper in three accepted at a place that accepts 70 percent of papers? Sure!\u201d says Jodi Schneider, an associate professor of information sciences at the University of Wisconsin\u2013Madison, who was not involved in Clune\u2019s study.<\/p>\n The AI\u2019s papers \u201care okay but not great,\u201d Clune says. To him, some of the AI\u2019s ideas seemed truly creative, yet the system struggled with execution. \u201cThe logic and the writing and the thinking throughout the whole paper didn\u2019t all fit together beautifully,\u201d he notes. Further issues included hallucinated references<\/a>, duplicated figures and a lack of methodological rigor.<\/p>\n Overall, Clune and his colleagues\u2019 new study has received a lukewarm reception. \u201cThe approach is agentic and without any real novelty,\u201d says Maria Liakata, a professor of natural language processing at Queen Mary University of London, who was not involved in the work.<\/p>\n There was one metric, though, where the AI Scientist did outperform human researchers by a huge margin: it produced a formally passable paper on machine learning within 15 hours at a cost Clune estimated to be around $140. Compare that with the capability of a graduate student, who might take a full semester to write their first accepted workshop paper, according to Schneider.<\/p>\n As costs drop and output speeds increase, AI-authored papers present the scientific community with an immediate challenge<\/a>. \u201cThe AI-written papers are probably going to make things much worse,\u201d warns Yanan Sui, an associate professor at Tsinghua University in China and the senior workshop chair for ICLR 2026.<\/p>\n To safeguard against this flood, top-tier venues have begun setting limits. \u201cThere are strict rules for the main conference that do not allow submission of purely AI-written papers,\u201d Sui says. The compromise, for now, is forced transparency\u2014the authors using AI must clearly state how it was used. Sui admits, though, that journals and conferences usually lack the tools <\/a>to reliably detect AI-generated contributions.<\/p>\n The tools to autonomously write these contributions, meanwhile, have already started to proliferate. Intology claimed<\/a> its AI Zochi passed peer review for the main proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (though human researchers were involved in areas such as verifying results before submission and communicating with peer reviewers). Another group called the Autoscience Institute stated<\/a> that its AI system created papers that were accepted at ICLR workshops before the AI Scientist.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re not going to be able to remove the power to generate AI scientific papers,\u201d says Aaron Schein, a data scientist at the University of Chicago and one of the ICBINB workshop organizers. \u201cThis technology is only going to get better. I don\u2019t think there\u2019s anything to do about that.\u201d<\/p>\n But what if one day the AI-generated papers stop being mediocre?<\/p>\n Clune sees the transition unfolding in two phases. \u201cIn the very short term, you\u2019re going to get a lot of slop and garbage, and the peer review systems are going to have to deal with that,\u201d he says. But eventually, he argues, AI systems will be far better<\/a> at science than human researchers. \u201cI predict the AI Scientist actually marks the dawn of a new era of rapid scientific advances,\u201d Clune claims, imagining humans reduced to curators witnessing AI achieve scientific wonders.<\/p>\n Liakata, though, thinks there\u2019s still something for us humans to do. \u201cI believe the future is not fully autonomous scientific discovery but advanced human-agent interaction where the human can scrutinize and contribute to the process,\u201d she says.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Science has always relied on a curious human\u2019s mind forming a hypothesis, designing an experiment, analyzing the results…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":566038,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,61],"class_list":["post-566037","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566037","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=566037"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/566037\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/566038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=566037"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=566037"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=566037"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}