It was a process that had become routine for Maxim Topaz.
The associate professor at Columbia University’s School of Nursing had grown accustomed to having artificial intelligence tools help polish scientific papers for grammar, formatting, and other details. But a few weeks after submitting his latest research, the academic journal he was due to publish in came back with questions about a reference. The AI tool Topaz had used had silently inserted a fabricated source into his work.
“I felt deeply embarrassed,” Topaz, who leads a team at Columbia developing AI applications in healthcare, told Fortune.
“I’m an AI researcher. I know about hallucinations,” he said. “If this is happening to me, an AI expert, what happens to other people?”
That near-miss sent Topaz on an investigation to find out how often experts were getting subtly fooled by AI. The answer, it turns out, is a lot.
