Contemporary AI lacks the imagination to diverge or negate in science
By Honglin Bao, Siyang Wu, Xiao Liu, Sida Li, Shiyun Cao, James A. Evans
This large-scale study invited authors of 121,640 preprints to judge LLM-generated follow-up ideas from their own papers, collecting 25,139 rating sets from 6,749 scientists. It finds contemporary AI lacks imagination to diverge or negate in science, with non-reasoning LLMs collapsing into convention.