AI tools are spotting errors in research papers: inside a growing movement

Two new AI tools check for errors in research papers including in the calculations, methodology and references.Credit: Jose A. Bernat Bacete/Getty Late last year, media outlets worldwide warned that black plastic cooking utensils contained worrying levels of cancer-linked flame retardants. The risk was found to be overhyped – a mathematical error in the underlying research suggested a key chemical exceeded the safe limit when in fact it was ten times lower than the limit. Keen-eyed researchers quickly showed that an artificial intelligence (AI) model could have spotted the error in seconds. The incident has spurred two projects that use AI to find mistakes in the scientific literature. The Black Spatula Project is an open-source AI tool that has so far analysed around 500 papers for errors. The group, which has around eight active developers and hundreds of volunteer advisers, hasn’t made the errors public yet; instead, it is approaching the affected authors directly, says Joaquin Gu ... Read full article.