Meta has just released a demo of its new Galactica language model for scientific papers, which can summarise academic literature, solve mathematics problems, write Wikipedia articles, and more, all based on simple text prompts.
A large corpus of over 360 million in-context citations and over 50 million unique references from a variety of sources has helped Galactica models to suggest citations and help discover related papers.”
The screenshot above shows the Galactica demo site, where you can enter any subject and receive articles and explanations based on it.
Simply tap on the ‘Generate More’ prompt at the bottom of the screen, and the system will keep adding to your document, providing more and more text on the topic.
With time, you can create an entire research paper using the app, which will include references, formulas, and everything else required for academic rigor.
It’s like an AI image generator, but for scientific papers. Students will certainly use this to cheat the system and improve their grades with less effort or no effort at all in some cases.
Meta said that “Highly technical content generated by Galactica may seem very authentic and confident, but it may be subtly inaccurate in important ways.”
“This tool reduces the mental burden of composing papers by up to 40 percent. It does not write papers for you, but it does reduce your mental workload substantially.”
The system can accomplish most things, but not all of them, so it seems based on this example that teachers will still be able to tell if you are using such a system.
There are already reports of students using AI systems to generate school assignments, and some particularly enterprising kids have also sold AI-generated homework to their classmates to get them out of homework.
It’s hard to say whether Galactica will make inventing new things more difficult since generated papers are based on old ideas.
It appears that the purpose of the paper determines whether or not you use sources. Are you looking to advance in your field or just finish your homework?
It’s interesting to observe how AI is progressing, and how systems are evolving into more creative, cognitive procedures.
