Physics.
World. Hello and welcome to the Physics World Stories Podcast.
I'm Andrew G. Lester, and I'm suffering a little bit with hay fever.
So I'll try and keep my voice to a minimum as we explore the influence of chat
G p T and other AI bots on the lives of physicists.
We'll focus on how physics education may change as a response to these chatbots,
but we'll also look at how physics as a discipline may change.
What are the skills that future physicists will need,
and what are the tasks that may be lost to artificial intelligence?
Later we'll hear from a student whose life as a physicist is really just
beginning as the world around us changes as a result of artificial intelligence
breakthroughs. But first, we'll hear from Philip Moti.
But for this conversation to make sense,
I do need to mention that I'm also a lecturer in sciences communication.
Here's Phil Marriott.
I'm a physicist at University of Nottingham. I've been here a very long time.
Actually next year I'll be in Nottingham for 30 years.
So as well as the lecturing side of things, which I really do enjoy there,
there are research focuses on single atom manipulation,
single molecule manipulation with scanning, probe microscopes,
looking at the forces between atoms. Ultimately,
what I sometimes describe it as though this is a little bit more applied than
really what we're going for, it's really quite fundamental. Researches.
Can we do 3D printing with atoms? So can we build structures up atom by atom?
So there's a lot of interest as well within the group and machine learning
methods. Um, so chat,
G p t and g p t four and things like that are certainly of
interest. The the problem is with G P T four, it's, um,
like the success of the chat G P T, but they've been a great deal more, um,
uh, how can I put it? Closed door about it.
So in terms of how it's been trained, in terms of just what, uh,
you know, parameter space, there is just what types of, of network.
Um, it's obviously one of these pre generative transformer models,
which is where the G P T thing comes from. Um, uh,
but in terms of beyond that, they're getting a little bit more, um,
proprietary about things.
So it's actually quite difficult to tell what's going on. It's interesting,
we've evolved to the point where our artificial neural networks are just
as complicated and impossible to understand as the organic neural networks in
our heads. So in terms of all the layers.
I wanted to know why AI bots such as chat G P T,
are significant from a physics perspective.
How can they help physicists in their work?
But I also wanted to get to the heart of where some of the fears come from.
They, the interesting thing from physics perspective, it,
it's now capable of interpreting images.
Its spatial reasoning seems to be a heck of a lot better than shot G P T. Um,
and it's one paper I've just pulled off the archive, um,
said that has has put uh,
G P T four through its paces on something called the force concept
inventory,
which is generally if you want to test the efficacy of different, um,
undergraduate courses, particularly first year courses, Newton's laws,
kinematics, et cetera,
you give them this F c I force concept inventory at the start,
you give them at the end and you hope that you've actually had a positive
influence on them. Chat G P T got 28, sorry, not chat. G P T chat.
G P T actually got about a 50% score g PT four.
First time it saw that, uh, inventory,
that set of questions got 28 outta 30, which is rather scary .
So it can increasingly do physics.
. But why is that scary?
Uh, it's interesting, um, in terms of
it's both scary and very impressive,
I guess scary almost in an impressive sense. I think we've got a,
there's an awful lot of hand ringing and there's an awful lot of,
let's let's try and, um, shut this down mixture.
Students don't get access to it, let's ban it. That's obviously not gonna work.
It's a really powerful tool,
but we have to learn how to exploit it. Um,
there's a broader question as well in that, you know, even if we do ban it,
what's the point in sending students out into the big bad world with skills
that chat that that G P T for and its successors,
you know, can just,
they can do it in a fraction of the time a student could do it or a graduate
could do it. We have to be giving them skillsets that
compliment what an AI can do otherwise, what's the point of us?
What is the point of us, you know, more tangibly,
what do physicists now who are, you know, going through education,
what should they be?
What skills should they be learning so that they're still needed in 2040 or
beyond?
I think the,
the fun most fundamental skill we can give them is not
how to, you know, uh, think about and write down a Hamiltonian.
It's not to think about how they're gonna do some problem in quantum mechanics
or classical fields or how to do one bit of Dave gra or curl.
It's how to educate themselves. That's,
that's the skill we really should be teaching them.
That's to have that independence, self-reliance,
resilience to be able to teach themselves. Um,
obviously we have to do that within the context of physics.
We're teaching physics, but the, the thing is,
if we're playing catch up really with the technology and we're gonna lose,
we really are gonna lose. Cuz it's, it's developing.
I know exponentially is a word that's thrown around a return that's thrown
around a great deal,
but I think it's pretty clear it's developing exponentially and
yeah, I think we radically need to change what we're doing. You know,
the old style exam question of please regurgitate pages 42 to
47 of your notes, this derivation, that doesn't work anymore.
And it didn't work when I was a undergraduate or any of us were an
undergraduate.
I remember clearly in third year being able to do all
the equations in terms of minority and ma majority, um,
carrier occurrence in a P junction. You asked me,
sit me down and ask me to explain in a few sentences what is a P junction,
how does it work? I don't know, but I can regurgitate those derivations.
So we have to think, yeah,
we radically need to change things. Yeah.
It's an interesting one. I I think back to sort of,
I dunno what March, 2020 with Covid on the, you know, suddenly,
uh, arriving and I conversations happening at universities that were sort of,
you know, well maybe by January we'll be back to normal.
And the, you know, how that changed the way that we had to teach and,
and the way we had to do things. It was kind of, you know,
one thing, but this feels like we,
we don't know where if church G B T four, as you say, exponential,
if church G B T four can do what it is just being talked about doing,
then what does 5, 6, 7, 8, 10 do?
And so we can't plan now based on what church G B T
and others can do now. Yeah. Right.
So I was dis I've gotta admit with the, with the, uh, you know,
COVID pandemic et cetera, and, and all the changes,
I really thought we had a massive opportunity to grasp the
nettle and shake things up. That's not what happened.
And some of that might be her fault in general,
sort of academic university inertia,
but a lot of it's also coming from the students.
There is nothing easier for the students and for us for them to sit in a lecture
theater among 200 other students and listen to us drone on for 50 minutes.
And it's,
it's really disappointing that that's seen as the pinnacle of education
and that's what they want or that's what they claim to want, they want,
you know, well, it's not what they claim.
It's absolutely what quite a few of them want.
So I don't wanna generalize across the board.
There are others who are keen on the sort of more interactive approach and sort
of trying to shake things up a little bit, but quite a few just wanted,
I want to go to the lecture theater, I wanna listen to you,
I wanna note it down and then I wanna regurgitate it in the exam. The.
The,
the simplest solution from an education point of view seems to me to be that in
terms of assessment,
we go back to close book exams that happen in a room at a particular time. Yeah.
Is that, is that the only solution or what, I mean.
I think it will be disappointing if that's the only solution,
but particularly with chat G P T and whatever G P T models in general,
when they can, they're now getting, as I said,
28 outta 30 on on first year, uh, physics problems.
And I also noticed, um, Scott Aronson, who's, uh,
quantum computing expert is bloggers brilliant by the way. Um,
he set a G P T for his quantum computing exam paper,
so fairly advanced quantum concepts and it got 69, 60 9%.
So just, just slightly off a first. Mm-hmm.
So if the,
if we continue to set traditional exam papers, it has to be in, as you say,
in under those closed conditions. But that just seems archaic to me.
What would you like to see then?
Yeah, that's a very good question. . It's a very, so the,
I think we need to embed, um, G P T, um, and these, these models,
theis of whatever, um, stripe into our,
our teaching and indeed into our assessment. I don't know,
we get to the point where we tell G P T four, um, to,
it can already, G P T four can already do this,
but it can simulate certain physical systems, I don't know,
like a simple pendulum or a driven pendulum.
We ask the students to protect the output,
but we could even do things like ask G P T to deliberately
include errors in the physics and ask for the students to,
to pick those out. I think we have to be really open with the students. I think,
you know, we say use G P T, um, use ais,
use whatever you can in terms of writing your report,
but tell us where you've used that.
The issue then is, of course,
let's rely on a great deal in the students honesty and that might happen.
So we have to think about just how we build in use
of, of these models, these, these ais into our,
into our assessment and indeed our teaching processes where it's great,
for example, on the teaching side rather than the assessment side is,
and I've already used to do,
do this generates some multiple choice questions for me on this topic,
and that's great.
And then you use those in the class and with whatever online polling thing.
So it's a real benefit. Then, um, there's also things like, um,
in principle, uh, you know, close captioning,
putting captions on videos,
lecture videos or whatever we could ask it to do that might still struggle with
my accent . Um, but, uh, yeah, so there are,
there are a lot of, there a lot of benefits.
But the assessment side is, is the tricky one,
as you say. Well, how, where's, where's your stance? How do you feel? Do you,
are you happy with traditional exams as they are? No.
I'm, I mean, so I don't teach physics. I teach wildlife filmmaking, podcasting,
uh, science filmmaking. So it's,
it's quite easy for me to move into areas where, at least at the moment,
artificial intelligence isn't particularly good in terms of making podcasts and
films.
But there's the thing, why, so that's exactly it.
So that's the type of thing we should be asking our students to do. Make videos,
make short YouTube videos, make podcasts,
add in a lot more sort of, of the creative side of things.
One thing that does drive me up the wall,
and particularly as my kids have gone through school,
is that we have the STEM subjects over here, and that's for all the drones.
And over here we have the creative subjects and there's so much creativity,
of course, in science, but we need to exploit that a little bit more in,
in undergraduate degrees. Yeah. And indeed postgrad, you know,
postgraduate degrees.
As well. No, I, I mean, you're not gonna find me disagree with that,
obviously . Cause it's my, it's my bread and butter. But, um, yeah, no,
I th I mean, it's,
it seems to me though that there's possibly a time in the future where,
you know, podcasts are being generated by artificial intelligence. I,
I thought maybe they're, but maybe they're not that good.
Oh, I think there's a time coming. Um, there's a,
in the not too distant future where if I want to generate a lecture video,
I type, I give it some,
some video of me and the key themes and it generates a deep f
I don't think that time is too far off.
No. Would you use that.
? No, I wouldn't. For the same reason that I wouldn't, I like to write,
um, and I wouldn't, I wouldn't use,
I know this is increasingly common to use chat G P T or g p t four to actually
write the introductions to papers.
Journals have said that they're not gonna accept that.
But I've read quite a few blog posts and quite a few articles where people are
freely admitted. They've used G P T four in some sort of creative sense.
And that doesn't sit well with me cuz it's essentially
plagiarism.
We've had essay mills for some time though,
and maybe the people who make essay mills should be the most worried. Cause.
They don't need that. Oh, they are. They really are. So it, it, but again,
there's, there's, um, some on the education side actually,
the legal, well they would claim the legal as well, allegedly . Um,
um, but Eva Can Academy, for example,
is going to use G P T four as a virtual tutor. So it's,
it's, um, and that, that's also a good idea. In fact,
we could use G P T four as a virtual shooter in
sort of real time in a, in a classroom or indeed in a lab.
It's, you know, the one is a big issue in, in, if you've got a class, I, um,
one of my first jobs here was to revamp her second year, uh, lab.
And I was second year, uh, lab organizer for, oh God, seven years,
eight years, I can't remember.
And one of the issues is always having enough demonstrators.
Cause particularly in a Friday afternoon when the experiments aren't working and
14 hands are up, you're gonna, if we had a sort of virtual lab assistant,
particularly now because it can interpret images,
you could almost envision a a,
a situation whereby the student takes a a photo or takes a video of this piece
of kid isn't working. What are your suggestions? So.
Uh, can we just step away from education for a bit? Because there's, it's,
it's not just gonna affect physicists who are learning. Is it,
it's gonna affect physicists who are, uh, in practice, isn't it?
It's interesting, this paper that I, um, just from the York, a guy called, um,
Colin G West who's at the University of Colorado,
and it's was uploaded actually just April, April the 16th. There's a great,
the final paragraph of his paper,
which is well worth reading and get in the archive.
I'll just give everybody the tightly they wanna chase it up.
It's advances in apparent conceptual physics reasoning in G P T four.
And the final paragraph is ultimately,
perhaps what is most intriguing is what G P T four tells us.
Not about the future of our classrooms,
but about our future conceptions of physics as a discipline.
G p t four succeeds at physics tasks,
even though it is only explicitly programmed to emulate human speech and not
provided directly with any of the formal structure of mathematics or the laws of
physics. So it's,
it's changing not only how we teach, but it will change how we do research.
In fact, the, the computer scientists are already talking about, you know,
coding will evolve to the point where it's prompt engineering, you, you,
you engineer the right prompts to feed to an a AI to give you the code.
And we're again, probably not too far off. In fact,
in some cases it's already doing this where you feed the data and it picks out
correlations in that data and it's okay that,
that you can sort of accept.
But then it goes the further step and comes up with a physical model to explain
tho those, those correlations. That's very close, I would say.
And then again, where does that leave us ?
So, so if we're gonna work alongside these things, we need to find,
I guess it's again that,
that that collaboration between the artificial neuronets and the organic
neuronets, we will complement each other and we'll hopefully,
I'd like to think that it's, it's creativity.
The AI's creativity will be sort of complimenting ours.
It works in a slightly different way, perhaps even then. It's,
it's strange thing, you know,
we've got billions upon billions of neurons in there.
You've got effectively billions upon billions of artificial neurons for the, um,
for some of these very sophisticated models. What's the difference?
We could get into a bit of an existential crisis here, .
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I, so like if you are,
if you're working at LIGO or you're working at cern or is this affecting you?
I, I think it could be in terms of, of data analysis in terms of, it's already,
so we're trying to build in different neural nets into what we do,
which is all about image interpretation and, oh,
at least partly about image interpretation, but also about spectral analysis.
So looking for correlations in different spectra.
There's already been a couple of papers,
a number of papers published over the last few years where they fed
a lot of data over, say the course of a decade to, uh,
unsupervised neural net and asked it to find the correlations and the data that
humans didn't spot. And there's actually been a nature paper published on this,
whether the AI spotted those correlations that we didn't spot.
So I think it's, it's like all these things, it's not gonna be of, you know,
black or white issue. It's gonna sort,
everything's gonna sort of fall in that gray area where we have some sort of
convergence, I hope. Well,
it's either that or really or AI overloads are gonna take over
doomed.
. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Are you a science fiction fan?
I am, yeah. I'm a big Star Trek fan. Oh, okay. For one thing. Yeah. Okay.
But I mean, should we be watching,
you know, 2001, um, ex Machina mm-hmm.
and thinking mm-hmm. .
No, that's a classic.
Isn't it? Both.
Of those are classics, of course. Yeah. Right. Yeah.
Yeah. Her, you know, this, there's,
there's a number of films out there about this, this topic.
How close are they to sort of the reality that we're gonna see?
If you'd asked me 10 years ago, I'd said, oh, that's just so,
so many centuries ahead now. Um,
we're they're pretty close, I would say. I would say they're pretty close.
And, um, yeah, it's,
well already we've had Musk at Ireland about, I dunno how many it is in total,
a thousand, um, thought leaders as I,
I'm sure they'd like to describe themselves, um, call for sort of moratorium on,
on AI research. So it's,
I think that's misguided as well. Cuz again,
trying has shut it down for one thing,
you'll just drive stuff underground.
And plus Musk with his Neurolink stuff, which is not the most open, um,
research platform in the world, um,
is it's just a little bit hypocritical for him to call for a moratorium.
So yeah, it's, I, in terms of the science fiction,
yeah, I think there's lots that we can learn from the dystopian
scenarios in some science fiction novels. Yeah.
Whether we would or not is another question, isn't it? I mean, I've,
I dunno about you.
I've read Red Ready Player One and I can see that happening right before our
eyes at this particular moment, so I don't see why. Yeah, I mean they, it's,
it's all very well and good academic sitting around saying,
we need to work out how to do this. But, you know,
so are the other people who are maybe not as motivated
in the same way?
Precisely Absolutely. And Ready Player one. Of course,
I was bitterly disappointed with the movie because they stuck out the bit about
Rush.
. Yeah. Okay. Yeah.
I was so happy of Brooke that included Rush's 2112.
There's a dystopian future for you as well. Wow. Um, as a core part of the plot.
. Yeah.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, we're gonna go off topic slightly, but let's do that.
So have you seen them live Rush?
Oh, lots of times, yeah. Oh, you a fan as well? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah. Oh, oh, oh, brilliant. Yeah. Um,
I saw them four times on the time machine tour cause they did moving pictures in
its entirety. Brilliant. So, um, favorite Mike? So.
The conversation did slightly veer off at this moment as we went into
our favorite concerts by the Canadian Rock Band Rush.
And as interesting as I'm sure you'd find that we did return to the conversation
of artificial intelligence. So I did speak to somebody who, who signed that,
um, that letter the moratorium with, with Elon Musk.
It wa it wasn't Elon Musk that I spoke to , but it was someone else who,
I won't, I won't name it.
And they said that essentially that was a line in the sand.
They didn't think it was gonna change anything. It was just to say, look,
we know this is coming and we're alerting.
You. Yeah. It's a pr exercise, really. Yeah, absolutely. No, I, I, I agree.
And it's, it, I think there is some value in that,
even if it is just a sort of pr stunt to, to,
to flag up that we need to be concerned about this. Um,
but it's, you know,
it really is a question of bolting the stable door after the horse run away.
Uh, I don't think, you know, the genie's out of the bottle.
I don't think if I can pile around , um, I,
I don't think it's gonna be easy to, to stop this as you,
for us exactly the reason you say you might well have the academic
research in the academic sector shut down, but not everybody's a good actor.
So yeah.
If you are, um, listening to this podcast and you are also, you know, in,
in school now, the world looks very different. We.
Need to ensure that we are preparing kids for a,
a very much a brave new world, um,
where a lot of the skills that we've taught in the past will be completely
redundant.
So there's creativity,
there's being able to educate yourself. What does that mean?
Don't rely on, you know, us to go, there's the textbook,
there's what you should read. It's like I should in principle be able to go,
right. Here's a problem in quantum mechanics. If you go, that's where I'd like,
you know, you may say that's just making us completely redundant,
but it's a question of how we design the, um,
the activities, how we design the, the, um,
the assessment as well that will lead students to that point.
So at least by the time they're in their final year or the penultimate year,
they're at the point where sort of,
we are almost redundant in terms of delivering material.
It's more about how they seek out that material process,
that material, analyze that,
be that with chat g p t and the like. Um,
and then also present it. And that's coming back to the podcast thing, you know,
being able to present it, being able to be persuasive, um,
in terms of either written, oral communication, whatever,
those are valuable skills,
but they're far outside the traditional skills we'd expect of a physicist.
There's.
Part of me that wants to say, well,
I do teach on a master's in science communication.
It sounds like we're gonna be needed, but this.
Yeah, you absolutely will. Um, but oh,
we should get you to Nottingham sometimes soon to tell us all honestly I'm,
yeah. Um, to tell us all about that. Yeah. Um,
because we've got quite a few students who are interested in science
communicators and I used to teach, um, no, that's absolutely the wrong word.
Uh, and I don't like the word deliver at all. Uh, how about convene?
I used to convene a module, a fourth year module called, um,
the Politics Perception and Philosophy of Physics, uh, which is still running.
I'm no longer doing, I, I paid my Jews, I did it for seven or eight years,
but it was very much developed along the lines of much more like a humanities
module whereby discussion, debate.
And we cover things like, uh, the so-called science wars where, you know,
you've got one group of sociologists saying that there's nothing truly
discovered by science evidence, culturally related, et cetera.
And you've obviously got the scientists who work at that,
but also things like peer review, how does peer review work, um, you know,
gender balance, all those types of things.
And the first time I ran it and tried to sort of prompt this discussion,
I was really,
really worried because it's a group of 40 physics graduates Oh, undergraduates.
And I'm thinking, okay, this is gonna be tumble weight. So, okay.
And I asked for the first, do the little intro and then, um,
ask for the first question and a hand goes up and then the
floodgates opened and I had to kick them out after an hour and a half.
So some of the, in that case,
they knew the module they were going into and they knew what it was like,
what it was gonna be like. So they were self-selecting in that sense.
But I think this idea that absolutely every physicist is completely
inept and entirely incapable of,
um, communicating. He says as he struggles to get through that sentence,
, um, is is not always the case.
So yes, the ability to communicate is,
uh, just essential. And again, it's something that's not traditionally in,
in university physics courses, although there's a lot of focus,
increasing focus on, um,
presentation in terms of scientific presentation,
technical presentation less so on.
Well explain to, you know, somebody with absolutely, you know,
background in science,
why we should care about your particular research in three sentences, golf.
Absolutely.
You've recently been on the Physics World Weekly podcast speaking about quantum
woo. Yeah. And that's, I think that's my concern.
My main concern with life generally is people following stuff that's not true
and, and leading themselves down a or being led down particular paths which are
harmful to them and others.
And with G P T and others like it making up stuff,
including making up references.
W there are a number of cases where students have used G P T and the way they've
been caught is not in terms of that, that, you know, this you're nodding,
you know, this has not, but for those who perhaps don't, they, um,
has not been in terms of the writing style,
it's been that G P T has made up references and that's the only way it was
caught.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
It's happened to me with a particular student doing a dissertation
and essentially the whole dissertation was,
was done via chat G P T.
And well, there's no policy really .
Like there certainly wasn't at the time for, um, what we do with that.
And the, not only was it only really recognizable by the fact that the,
um, citations and references were all made up, but um,
that was the only way we could sort of say anything about it.
Yeah, exactly. Exactly.
So this is what I mean about sort of genie and the bot genie outta the bottle.
It's, if we can't track this,
and I think there have been some claims with chat G P T,
at least in terms of looking at the,
the way it uses or constructs the sentences. There may be,
there may be possibilities of detecting that it is AI generated.
I don't think with G P T four, that's not really the case. I could be wrong,
but I it's if,
so it's much less the case and as it evolves it'll get to the point where it's
indistinguishable.
I i, if we're teaching students to learn for themselves,
the, the tool they're gonna use for that is the internet.
Part of that is chat g p t four or whatever it is in the future.
And is anybody in control of that? Who's is that?
Nobody's in control of the internet. So it's just how,
how do you discern what's true? Exactly.
Exactly. And that's a skill, that's a skill that many of us struggle to,
to, to, to keep on top of. So getting that across to the next generation,
getting that across to students is, is, is certainly gonna be problematic.
But it's absolutely essential to be, um, what's an authoritative source,
you know,
is I have my certain broadsheets that I like and even by using the term
broadsheet, I date myself . Absolutely. You know,
as the guardian and authoritative source is the Times and authoritative
source, you know, is Fox News an authoritative source?
Why should they use, not use Fox News and use the Guard Unified? Those are,
you know,
very deep questions because of course the guardian can also get it wrong and you
know, journals can get it wrong. They've been examples of,
of many examples of where peer reviews completely failed and there's junk out
there. So it's, yeah, it's a difficult,
difficult can of worms.
, there's possibly a world, I can't imagine this world of course,
but there's possibly a world where, you know,
even political leaders might not tell the truth.
, it's like one of those parallel universes. Yeah.
. But no, but joking apart, you know,
not too long ago you could probably speak to people who would say, you know,
you just have to respect the people in authority.
They are the people who have the, the.
Truth. Yeah, definitely not so Sony in my lifetime. Absolutely.
We've gone from that, you know, authorities there,
you don't dare speak truth to power. What now everybody is,
is questionable at every level. And.
Is there a sense in which these tools might be used to actually
divine what is true,
to actually be able to sift through the internet,
to sift through the, the sum of human knowledge, the sum of understanding.
Is there a some something that this AI could do to find the
ans the big, the answers to the big questions and find the truth.
And come, finally come up with the answer of 42, uh, .
But The question is, okay,
so how would we quantify that? How would,
how do we quantify the truth after all these things are just processing numbers,
looks like words, but really it's all numbers.
So how do we quantify the truth? You know,
how do we quantify the truth in science is, is an interesting question as well.
Cause a big element of that is, you know,
and one of the things I used to cover in this fourth year module is the blessed
fineman. I'm a big fan of fineman, but he,
it is something of a cliche for a physicist to wheel out the fineman in.
But one of the,
the more famous Fomen quotes is he was asked to define
what science is to a, the believe of conference of school teachers.
And his one sentence definition was science is the belief in the ignorance of
experts. Which is sort of gives us all a warm fuzzy feeling,
yet it's all about being objective and it's a, but that's not how science works.
You know,
the first few paragraphs or indeed in some cases the first few pages of a
scientific paper are what's come before.
And it's really about building on what's come before.
And a big element of that truth is consensus.
So you could argue that you train these things to look for consensus,
but of course then the issue is consensus can certainly build about something
that's complete nonsense . So it's,
it has to come back to empirical evidence,
it has to come back to empirical dead and it has to come back to the weight of
the evidence. And then,
and that's certainly how science works so people can have their opinions but it
always comes back to the experiment.
People can of course screw up the experiment,
but if a hundred people or a hundred groups do the experiment and they get the
same result, that's getting us closer to the truth. We never, ever,
ever get to what the truth is capital T in both cases. Um,
but it gets us closer. Could that be built in,
I think in the case of sort of analyzing scientific data? Yeah,
in terms of analyzing political data? Yeah.
I wanted to get the perspective of somebody who's currently a student with their
career in front of them, his corral green,
who's a regular contributor to the physics world magazine and website.
I'm uh, an astrophysics PhD student.
I'm doing my PhD at the University of Nottingham.
I study like black holes and galaxy evolution in the most simplest
terms.
There's like a specific type that I'm looking at and I'm trying to like see what
they do to the galaxies that they're in and maybe how they're triggered in the
first place. Cause we're not a hundred percent sure. So they're called um,
active galactic nuclei or a G N for sure. That's what everyone calls them.
And basically in the middle of every galaxy you have a super massive back hole
and that's what all like the stars and the dust and the soda systems and things
like that orbit around. Um,
and if just for whatever reason there's enough dust close enough to
the center of a galaxy,
it can start falling onto the black hole and all of the gravity from like
the densest object in the universe basically causes it to spew out a load of
energy.
So some galaxies look like they have a massive bright point in the middle of
them where obviously most of them, the black hole's invisible.
So you're looking out in the universe and you're just like,
why is that one really bright? What's sort of going on there?
And essentially I'm looking at those galaxies and being like,
why are they bright? You know,
what's caused this in the first place and is it doing anything to the rest of
the galaxy that it's in?
So Okay. Are you finding anything?
I'm finding, I'm finding some stuff. I'm finding some stuff.
But the science process you like you can't claim anything until you've had it
looked at a lot. So got some ideas but we're getting there.
You said we don't really know how they form,
I thought we did know how black holes form.
We dunno why that type of like process is triggered in the first place.
So we don't know how all of the sort of like dust and things started falling
onto the black hole. Um,
and why it isn't happening to every galaxy or why they exist in the first place.
So that's what's going on. Um, we know why black holes form mostly, mostly.
Does Ai does chat G P T,
does any of this stuff come into what you are doing at the moment?
So I don't use it uh, in my work specifically,
but it has started coming up actually quite a lot. Just in general. Um,
in my department we actually had a seminar the other week all a all about it,
like what it could possibly mean for the future and things like that. Um,
cuz uh,
things like this sort of sort of common waves cuz prior to this the
new sort of like shiny thing is machine learning that a lot of people are now
actually using in their research. Um, so it was thinking about like ah,
in, you know, in the next like five,
10 years are people gonna be just using AI as you know,
as much as they'd use any kind of coding, um,
forgotten the word,
sort of any anything that they use to code or are they going to try and like cut
it out completely and things like that.
Which has been quite interesting to see happen live almost.
In the seminar. Is are people concerned about it? Is there excitement about it?
Uh, it's definitely like a bit of both. There is the concern,
the big thing that I sort of noticed straight away is how um,
with sort of undergraduates and their work and things,
there's already been, there's like a um,
sort of plagiarism checker thing called Turn It In that a lot of undergraduates
might have heard of and I've heard how that's already been like updated to
recognize like chat G P T and things like that. Um,
so there is uh,
worries about actually like assessing people and seeing like what do they know,
what don't they know? But then there's also really like how useful it could be.
Like people are seeing how it could be, um, really helpful in the future.
Especially with like writing papers and writing,
especially the introduction of papers where you are,
you can't plagiarize other people but you have to say essentially the same
things in a different way anyway.
So like for my work I'd have to define what a black hole is and
motivate the reason for studying it.
But I'm not the first person ever to study a black hole.
So there is like words of just like,
oh why don't you try like writing it yourself,
doing things like that and then like, um,
putting it into chat G P T and seeing if it can help you write it in a bit of a
like more concise way and things like that, which is really interesting to see.
So I mean are you using it yourself in that way or?
Hmm. I, so I haven't yet but I think I'm going to,
I think I'm definitely going to um,
I've definitely got colleagues of mine who've used it to just think of titles
for their papers as well.
That's one sort of hard thing trying to make it relevant to your
field but actually have it be catchy so people are likely to read it and things
like that. Um, and as the sort of saying always goes,
especially in like the more mathematical sciences,
we're not necessarily that great at writing.
So spent years and years learning all this hard maths and then suddenly you've
gotta now start writing papers which can be, you know,
any kind of length but you know, 10, 15 pages worth of writing is,
doesn't come naturally to most of us. So it's very helpful in being like,
well this is the hardest bit, can we,
can we get an AI to sort of supplement the help with it and how
how much can we, you know, do before we have to be careful about obviously, um,
plagiarizing or writing things that maybe aren't a hundred percent like correct
in the way that we mean and things like that.
So I specifically would use it to help me like with the actual like language and
prose,
but when I'm using citations I need to specifically go through other like
peer reviewed papers that are published formally read those,
understand what they're saying and be like, yes, that's what I mean,
this paper backs it up, I'm using that. Um,
cuz something that's actually very interesting is that like, uh,
just in general we've had a play around with it and say like, okay this,
you know, this is a fact the sun is a star,
find like a a paper that like I could use to cite it
and it can spit out a link that looks like a paper citation but if you
click it it either goes to nowhere,
it's like a fake link or it goes to a paper that's completely different.
So sort of recognize the kind of links that you want if you're looking at
academic sources. But it's not like actually understanding them,
it just knows how to sort of mirror it on a page. So yeah,
you'd very much not want to use it to as a citation manager or anything like
that. Yes. Yeah. Okay.
It, I'm tempted to think of it as a sort of a calculator for writing.
Like we've had calculators for maths for a very long time, you know,
people doing maths have had Yeah.
Calculators and computers to help them with that maths and this is really a
calculator in a way to help you with writing.
The difference is a calculator is as far as I know always right,
but church isn't always right with its writing.
Yeah, exactly. And um,
other things as well is that it, it can help,
I I think it's very much leaning towards it can help with writing but you can't
really use it to do the science. Um,
we've seen it like we, there are other more sort of specialized
UMIs that maybe do a little bit better, but you could be,
you can't go and be like, oh can you code me up uh, a code that does x, y and z?
Um, like it can do a few things very in like a sort of simple way,
but you do have to go in and be like,
okay it's not quite getting that right but I can go in and like edit this a bit
and things like that.
So it hasn't gotten very much to the sort of like coding
mathi side yet,
but I think it's well on its way cuz I know that it has access to the um,
anything that's on Git, which is where you can upload like code two for free.
Anything that's um,
public it's got like access to and is sort of like learning from.
So we're not that far away from it sort of getting there. Very much so.
Yeah, I, my my feeling is I don't think it's gonna go away.
I think it's definitely going to become a part of like science and academia and
things like that, but it's gonna have to be done in a careful way.
So you're not just, if you are not just going in and being like, okay,
write me a code that does that, um, here's the data, uh,
it's done it all perfectly. Um,
let me go ahead with it in that way cuz then it's like have you done it?
Can you claim that you've done that? But.
What's to stop people doing that? Is it,
I mean is that a concern for you that effectively it might remove the
need for people to do coding?
Yeah, yeah I think that is sort of like a concern that's coming up, um,
being like, oh no, it's gonna sort of take,
take people's positions and jobs and things like that and you'd have a room full
of people typing into chat G P t instead of a room full of people typing into
whatever IDE they're using and things like that. But um, maybe I have,
maybe I have a bit of a cynical approach but I also think yes,
this is all happening. Yes this is all um,
sort of open source and new and shiny and people are having a look and going
in but you like it is made by a company.
They aren't going to just like have it completely go free reign and things
like that. I feel like monetization for it is coming fairly quickly.
I don't know if you'd get away with just being like, oh,
instead of hiring , you know, a master student or PhD students,
I'll get somebody to write this into chat g PT for me in the future.
So I, I'm not sure how how far it's gonna get before stuff starts coming up.
Like, oh pay us,
pay us to use it or you only get three free searches today,
audit and things like that. Mm-hmm.
. Oh yeah. So are you, but are you seeing, you know,
other PhD students, other undergraduates using it in a way which concerns you?
I.
Do believe that that is starting to happen.
I do think people are definitely getting homework questions or coursework
questions,
copying and pasting it into chat e p t and being like answer this question and
then just taking out wherever it says whether they've done it or not.
And that is, that is a problem,
that is a problem for universities because you know, you need to,
you do need to know these things if you want to get the qualification that they
are offering you. Um,
and it's hard because you can't always know what the answer will be
cuz right now maybe it's quite in its infancy and you can be like, okay,
it spits out the sort of five different versions of this and those are the ones
that we know have come from Chap G P T and so they have to be like filtered out
but it won't, it's very quickly, you know,
evolving beyond that and it might it might get a lot harder to do v
uh, very soon. I.
My my understanding is that quite soon it will be have an update where it's
gonna start being able to check and the veracity of what it's saying in,
in the next additional.
Yeah, yeah. I I've, I do think that is coming and yeah,
it's, it's not, it's not gonna be a trivial thing to sort of,
to sort of manage because you know, we're,
we are scientists, we are supposed to, you know,
enjoy innovation and things like that and there is,
I can't really see a a an ultra valid reason to not use it.
For example, like I said in paper intros where you are like,
okay these six papers are all saying different permutations of the
same thing and I need to be the seventh paper that says the different
permutation of the same thing.
But then it's that versus I'm gonna use this to like do my research or
get agree and you know, not actually do any of it myself.
So the knowledge is not there and therefore can you like claim fully
that you've uh, done that and things like that. So it's a,
it's it's, it's gonna be difficult cuz you wanna,
you wanna take advantage of the good parts of it without just relying on it
completely kind of thing.
Yeah.
So what what you want is humanity to look at something and take the best from it
and, and leave the rest behind.
Yep. Yep. If only , if only we could do that , oh god,
.
I mean so sure certain aspects of society will do that but it, it, you know,
we can't just hope that that will happen. Right. And, and yeah,
I wonder whether there's anything that could be done or do we need to do
anything from your point of view to, um,
apart from monetizing it and restricting access to it,
is there anything that needs to be done to,
to stop those people taking advantage of the,
the ease that it brings or the possibly less
pleasant ways of using it?
Yeah, I, I, hmm, I don't know cuz it's like,
um, it's gotta be mixed with the,
the bureaucracy even of like higher education in universities.
Cuz most academia in, at least that I know is done in universities.
Yes there's things like ESO and stuff like that but like, you know,
if you look around the globe,
they're all just people lecturers in different universities working on research
and like trying to sort of blend it through cuz you know,
there's been loads of innovations we've gone from like,
just even in my lifetime you've gone to smartphones then I was doing exams and
they were just like, smartphones and smart watches need to be off. Um,
and then like covid happened and they had to redo all of exams so people could
do them at home.
So obviously the questions became very different and also a lot harder because
you know,
a lot of them you could like Google prior to Covid and they're just like,
well if they're at home they can't just Google the answers.
I need like more long form thinking from them I guess.
Um, and, and now the next one is like with,
with AI and just typing something into literally just a chat
bot and getting an answer out and deciding,
well actually in this case it's fine and in,
and in this case we can't really like use it very much but I
dunno like what, what,
what could you do if it gets to like,
it gets in intergen enough that you could sit down and be like,
okay here's like some data I have, uh,
code up and analyze it and then tell me if there are any differences or
similarities or whatever else.
And if it produces a reasonable piece of work and you've gone through and
checked it, then would you not use it, you know?
Mm-hmm. , well you, yeah, it's,
it's a hard thing to say that you wouldn't use it, isn't.
It? Yeah. Yeah, because I, cuz that would, that would be like,
well what are we doing if we didn't use it actually so, mm.
But if you were considering the world before smartphones as
you say, and how smartphones have changed the world,
do you think chat G P T and other things are gonna change the world in a similar
way.
In the way that it just becomes very sort of common?
I can very easily imagine it in search engines and like,
I just don't think search engines are that different from it, right.
Whether you like it or not, it seems to be here to stay.
I think it's gonna just become more and more used in different things and
you'll have to adapt to deal with it.
I think I'm wary of it but I don't think it's gonna go away.
And I'm interested to see how it's dealt with because as
much as it's sort of coming into our lives, I'm not like a, you know,
a head of school,
a head of department or head of like science at a university or in
like a massive collaboration.
And so I think they are thinking about it and they've def I've definitely seen
it. I definitely know undergrad to use it. I mean I would,
if I was still doing an undergrad degree, I'd be like, damn,
this is gonna help me.
Let me open up a chat g p t account and see what I can do.
So I wanna see how it sort of goes in the next couple years and if they'll ever
embrace it or sort of try and filter it out as much as possible.
I, i if chat G B T and others evolve to the point or are
updated to the point where they can do essentially the,
the work that you want, the science, the coding, the what, the equations,
whatever it is that you are doing for your research,
what role do you see for yourself in.
That? I think it's difficult because if a a,
a department or a collaboration or something like that re like
changes the roles so that they get rid of all their PhD students and replace
them with chat ai.
I do think that they would be fine for like a while but then I think
they just run into the problem that's kind of happening already,
but a lot faster in that like there's a lot of a,
a mass in academia sort of finish your PhD, don't want to become a postdoc,
don't want to become a lecturer for whatever various reasons there are and then
you'll sort of run out of people to, to to keep things going.
Um,
so I don't think it's going to literally just get rid of us completely,
but I do think they need to be careful about it cuz you know,
at the end of the day you need somebody to lecture, you need somebody to mark,
need people to teach. And if you aren't ,
if you haven't got PhD students to become those people,
then you're just gonna lose 'em all.
If you could ask AI at,
at any form to answer any question in physics,
what would you ask it?
Oh, that is hard. . That is very hard.
I what initially comes to mind is maybe something that's like,
like Nobel Prize worthy. I think just for,
for like my personal, for my, you know,
personal curiosity. Um, but if I, if I,
if I could ask it any questions and I knew with like a hundred percent certainty
it would be right.
I think actually I'd ask it the like most Vegas question that I could
possibly think. So it could just solve everything like, oh,
what's the grand unified theory? And then it just spits out ,
everything that we're looking into. But,
but I would only do that after I finished my PhD.
I want to be a doctor first ,
then I'd like collapse it for the rest of everybody else. , I'd wait,
I would literally wait until I'm done ,
that's it. But that would be it.
I put that same question to Phil Moti.
Oh, what's the nature of the wave function? What is the wave function?
So we still, after a hundred years or so of quantum mechanics,
right at the core of it is this thing called the wave function.
So it's this mathematical object.
It's not an experimental observable as you say.
And there's lots and lots of debates between what's called the ontological camp
without going too philosophical and the epistemological camp in terms of,
is the wave function telling us about the nature of reality itself?
Or is it telling us about her information on the, on reality? What is the,
the nature of the way function That would, that would that, that would be it.
Yeah.
for me, ,
if chat g p t wants to replace physicists in the real world,
it's gonna have to develop that kind of curiosity.
I'd like to thank Carol Green and Philip Moti for joining me for this episode of
the podcast.
And I'd like to thank you for sticking with me with my hay fever voice.
We'll be back next month when hopefully my voice will be somewhere back to
normal. And we'll be exploring Moore's Law.
And thank you very much for listening.
Physics world.