Audit AI search tools now, before they skew research

Search tools assisted by large language models (LLMs) are changing how researchers find scholarly information. One tool, scite Assistant, uses GPT-3.5 to generate answers from a database of millions of scientific papers. Another, Elicit, uses an LLM to write its answers to searches for articles in a scholarly database. Consensus finds and synthesizes research claims in papers, whereas SciSpace bills itself as an ‘AI research assistant’ that can explain mathematics or text contained in scientific papers. All of these tools give natural-language answers to…