There’s no such thing as an obvious error in most fields. What would the AI say to someone who claimed the earth orbited the sun 1000 years ago? I don’t know how it could ever know the truth unless it starts collecting its own information. It could be useful for a field that operates from first principles like math but more likely is that it just blocks everyone from publishing things that go against the orthodoxy.
I am pretty sure that "the Earth orbited the Sun 1,000 years ago", and I think I could make a pretty solid argument about it from human observations of the behavior of, well, everything, around and after the year AD 1025.
It seems that there was an alternating occurences of "days" and "nights" of approximatively the same length as today.
A comparison of the ecosystem and civilization of the time vs. ours are fairly consistent with the hypothesis that the Earth hasn't seen the kind of major gravity disturbances that would have happened if our planet only got captured into Sun orbit within the last 1,000 years.
If your AI rates my claim as an error, it might have too many false positives to be of much use, don't you think?
Of course you could when even a 1st grader knows this is true.
You have to be delusional to believe this would be so easy though a 1000 years ago when not only everyone would be saying you are wrong but completely insane, maybe even such a heretic to be worthy of being burned at the stake. Certainly worthy of house arrest for such ungodly thoughts when everyone knows man is the center of the universe and naturally the sun revolves around the earth.
A few centuries later but people did not think Copernicus was insane or a heretic.
> everyone knows man is the center of the universe and naturally the sun revolves around the earth
more at the bottom of the universe. They saw the earth as corrupt, closest to hell, and it was hell at the centre. Outside the earth the planets and stars were thought pure and perfect.
I don't think this is about expecting AI to successfully fact-check observations, let alone do its own research.
I think it is more about using AI to analyze research papers 'as written', focusing on the methodology of experiments, the soundness of any math or source code used for data analysis, cited sources, and the validity of the argumentation supporting the final conclusions.
I think that responsible use of AI in this way could be very valuable during research as well as peer review.
