What constitutes knowledge creation, and who is allowed to do it? The artificial intelligence (AI) revolution is challenging the underpinnings of scientific research. Our disciplinary expertise, academic qualifications, and scientific methods of inquiry may not be sufficient to counter AI’s influence. These concerns are permeating not only academic departments but also conversations around family dinner tables.
Insomuch as discipline-wide scientific journals serve as spaces for debating questions that matter, we at The Journal of Politics propose a forum intended to enter that conversation and move us toward a shared understanding of the current role of AI in shaping knowledge production and disciplinary norms and to speculate on where it might take us.
AI can process vast volumes of information, identify patterns, construct models, and even generate new ideas by recombining existing ones. As AI continues to develop and evolve, it will almost certainly disrupt what we view as the ‘normal’ conduct and production of scientific knowledge. How will this alter the role of researchers in generating knowledge? In what ways can scholars harness the potential of AI and its power to help with research, and what are the boundaries and limits of that use? Generative AI seems destined to be a key tool of research moving forward. The challenge for scholars is to gain some perspective regarding its use, deepening our understanding of how and where AI might take root in the social sciences. In this vein, we seek statements from scholars about the role, the promise, and the threats posed by AI from an academic social scientific perspective.
We invite readers to engage in this discussion by submitting to this blog (link to page) their posts (<800 words) with arguments, predictions, and policy recommendations. Please submit your submissions via email to shvetso@binghamton.edu, with the subject line ‘AI Forum’. Submissions will be screened and selected to avoid repetitiveness and prevent spamming our readers. There will not be an enabled comments section for the posts; however, authors who wish to engage with a previous post are welcome to submit a post of their own. We aim to foster the conversation by posting these essays/statements on the official JOP blog and, subsequently, by inviting authors to contribute to an online compendium.