MIT has stated that due to concerns regarding the “integrity” of a high-profile paper addressing the impact of artificial intelligence on research and innovation, the paper should be “withdrawn from public discourse. ” The paper in question, titled “Artificial Intelligence, Scientific Discovery, and Product Innovation, ” was authored by a doctoral student in MIT’s economics program. It asserted that the implementation of an AI tool in a large but unnamed materials science laboratory resulted in the discovery of more materials and an increase in patent filings, although this came at the expense of reduced researcher satisfaction with their work. Last year, MIT economists Daron Acemoglu, a recent Nobel laureate, and David Autor both commended the paper, with Autor telling the Wall Street Journal that he was “floored. ” In a statement included in MIT’s announcement on Friday, Acemoglu and Autor noted that the paper had been “already known and discussed extensively in the literature on AI and science, even though it has not been published in any refereed journal. ” However, the two economists have since stated they now have “no confidence in the provenance, reliability or validity of the data and in the veracity of the research. ” According to the Wall Street Journal, a computer scientist experienced in materials science raised concerns to Acemoglu and Autor in January. These concerns were then escalated to MIT, prompting an internal review. MIT has indicated that, due to student privacy laws, it cannot disclose the outcomes of the review, but the paper’s author is “no longer at MIT. ” Although the university’s announcement does not name the author, both a preprint version of the paper and the initial press coverage identify him as Aidan Toner-Rodgers.

(TechCrunch has reached out to Toner-Rodgers for comment. ) Furthermore, MIT says it has requested that the paper be withdrawn from The Quarterly Journal of Economics, where it had been submitted for publication, and from the preprint repository arXiv. It appears that only authors can submit withdrawal requests on arXiv, but MIT notes that “to date, the author has not done so. ”