I have a curious relationship with AI.
A few years ago, I began to notice that when I posed a query on a topic in genetics – for a DNA Science post or to update my textbook Human Genetics: Concepts and Applications with McGraw-Hill – an answer would pop back that read curiously like my own words. Likely, they were.
So I wasn't terribly surprised when, a few months ago, a notice appeared in The New York Times and elsewhere: "Anthropic to pay authors $1.5 billion" in a class action lawsuit brought by three authors. Fourteen of the half million "works" that the company copied, to train its chatbot Claude, were mine!
AI Saves Time, Provides Details
Right now, I'm working on the next incarnation of my textbook. Editions are outdated, I'm told, so this is a revision – not much of a difference. To update in this age of AI, I still scrutinize new research findings, led to journal articles through old school press releases in my email.
But AI is becoming increasingly helpful in handling the minutiae, of quickly updating a statistic or other detail. What does screening the genome of an early embryo cell cost? How are cancer immunotherapies selected for a particular patient? Which single-gene diseases are amenable to correction using CRISPR?
To continue reading, go to DNA Science, where this post first appeared.