AI is everywhere these days, from AlphaFold to image analysis, allowing for incredible scientific advances. However, another compelling use case for A

Using AI in academia

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2024-11-22 18:30:15

AI is everywhere these days, from AlphaFold to image analysis, allowing for incredible scientific advances. However, another compelling use case for AI in science is using AI to help with the procedural aspects of science—things like writing letters, filling out forms, giving initial basic quality check-style feedback, and so on. Used with care and skill, AI chatbots can substantially reduce the time spent on many of these tasks, giving us back time to spend on the aspects we enjoy the most, like thinking about science, guiding trainees, and interacting with other scientists. These opportunities are particularly salient these days when levels of faculty stress and burnout are at sky-high levels, with increased paperwork burden coming from all directions. We recently held a meeting with several members of Mid-career PI Slack in which we discussed the various ways one can use AI to improve work efficiency, upon which this blog post is based (along with some of Arjun’s own personal thoughts and observations).

Note that there are several other uses and misuses of AI in science and academia. Aside from actual research using AI, AI is also extremely helpful for coding. We didn’t really cover coding with AI, but I will say that if you haven’t tried Cursor, you should 😀. Another whole area is teaching, for which the changes wrought by AI can be profound in some instances and surprisingly negligible in others. Both of these topics are worthy of their own blog posts but weren’t really touched upon much in our discussions.

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