MIT disavows doctoral student paper on AI’s productivity benefits

MIT says that due to concerns about the “integrity” of a high-profile paper about the effects of artificial intelligence on research and innovation, the paper should be “withdrawn from public discourse.” The paper in question, “Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Product Innovation,” was written by a doctoral student in the university’s 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’ satisfaction with their work. MIT economists Daron Acemoglu (who recently won the Nobel Prize) and David Autor both praised the paper last year, with Autor telling the Wall Street Journal he was “floored.” In a statement included in MIT’s announcement on Friday, Acemoglu and Autor described the paper as “already known and discussed extensively in the literature on AI and science, even though it has not been pu ... Read full article.