When Mohammed Shafi, a PhD student in civil engineering at the Indian Institute of Technology Guwahati, first saw his friends testing out artificial intelligence (AI) tools back in late 2022, he didn’t immediately see the appeal. Mostly, people seemed to be using generative AI platforms such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT as a replacement for Google, or as a novelty for drumming up ideas for practical jokes and pet names. “They were fun to play around with, but I didn’t necessarily sense any relevance to my own coursework or my research,” he says.
He quickly came around, however, when he started seeing more AI tools being built to meet the needs of students and scientists. Now a daily user of AI, Shafi has pieced together an entire pipeline of AI-powered platforms that feed into one another. These update him on new research, break down complex topics, troubleshoot experiments, organize his writing and citations, and help him to navigate the demands of classes and research.
Shafi now says that the arrival of AI has been “a revolution for research”, a sentiment seemingly shared by others. Surveys show that many university students and scientists are using AI in their work, often on a weekly or even daily basis. And whereas many educators and academic institutions initially responded with wariness, academia seems increasingly willing to allow students to use AI, albeit in controlled ways. Although it wouldn’t be impossible to go back to the way he did things before, Shafi says, “it’s hard to imagine wanting to”.
Here, Nature explores how academics and students can harness AI to streamline various parts of the research process.
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