"Does AI help or hurt researchers? As always, it’s complicated. A team led by UChicago sociology professor James Evans found that researchers who use AI publish three times more and receive more citations. However, after analyzing over 40 million papers in biology, medicine, chemistry, physics, materials science, and geology, the authors found that AI usage shrank the scope of researched topics by 4.63% and reduced researcher’s engagement with other papers by 22%. One explanation for this “curiosity shrinkage” is that AI is better at solving known problems (especially ones that require analyzing tons of data) than coming up with new questions. Overall, the authors are concerned that accelerating AI adoption will reduce researchers’ abilities to push further the frontiers of science." - Ori Shi, OCW