Linguistic and statistical analyses of scientific articles suggest that generative AI may have been used to write an increasingly large amount of scientific literature.
Both papers looked for certain words that large language models use habitually, such as “intricate,” “pivotal,” and “meticulously." By tracking the use of those words across scientific literature, and comparing this to words that aren't particularly favored by AI, the two studies say they can detect an increasing reliance on machine learning within the scientific publishing community.
In that year use of the words"meticulous,""commendable," and"intricate," rose by 59, 83, and 117 percent respectively, while their prevalence in scientific literature hardly changed between 2019 and 2022. The word with the single biggest increase in prevalence post-2022 was “meticulously”, up 137 percent.
The Stanford bods also noted that authors posting more preprints, working in more crowded fields, and writing shorter papers seem to use AI more frequently. Their paper suggests that a general lack of time and a need to write as much as possible encourages the use of LLMs, which can help increase output.in the research process isn't anything new, and lots of boffins are open about utilizing AI to tweak experiments to achieve better results.