More Artificial than Intelligent: Is the AI hype blinding scientists?

Abstract: Artificial Intelligence is not new, and it did not start impacting our lives directly only when chat GPT was released. But the wide social focus on these technologies does impact the way that scientists perceive them and engage with the technology. In my sub-field of astronomy I have been exposed to new models, new prototypes, promising a solution to how we automatically classify cosmic explosions. Years of new promises have failed to deliver a compelling product and since I have started working on this topic as a Schmidt AI in Science Fellow, I am starting to uncover why.

In this talk I want to present some of the issues I am seeing in how science can be dazzled by the AI mania, and I want to discuss how we can disentangle the true potential ML Technologies from the promises made to investors and media outlets, so that we can harness these new tools for Science in a reliable and sustainable way.