Will Generative Artificial Intelligence-Generated Knowledge Contribute to the Junkification of Science, and Does it have Intrinsic Commercial Value?
Abstract
There is a growing perception among scholars that academic research and publication are entering a phase of junkification, namely the infusion of knowledge that offers limited scientific contribution, or that clutters journals and databases without offering any major enlightenment. Although it is tempting to blame researchers for this phenomenon, junk science can only enter the knowledge stream when peer reviewers and editorial management permit it. Thus, the crisis of knowledge due to junkification is also a crisis of leadership. Although a counter-balance to junkification already exists, in the form of retraction, this is leading to the rise of a new culture (‘retract-and-perish’) and potentially behaviors (retractophobia and retractophilia). Prompt-based generative artificial intelligence (GenAI)-generated knowledge may pose the greatest risk to science’s junkification if human knowledge is no longer considered to be important or superior, and if GenAI-derived information is commercialized. This commentary provides a compact but subjective appreciation of some of the talking points surrounding science’s actual or perceived junkification, weighing in on how GenAI-derived information could be weighed, and whether aspects of it may contribute to an intensification of that junkification.
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