Of the ERC survey respondents, 85% thought that generative AI could take on repetitive or labour-intensive tasks, such as literature reviews. And 38% felt that generative AI would promote productivity in science, such as by helping researchers to write papers at a faster pace.

And there is a drawback to the productivity boost that LLMs might bring. Speeding up the paper-writing process could increase throughput at journals, potentially stretching editors and peer reviewers even thinner than they already are. “With this ever-increasing number of papers — because the numbers are going up every year — there just aren’t enough people available to continue to do free peer review for publishers,” Lancaster says.

About 55% of the respondents to the Nature survey felt that a major benefit of generative AI is its ability to edit and translate writing for researchers whose first language is not English. Similarly, in a poll by the European Research Council (ERC), which funds research in the European Union, 75% of more than 1,000 ERC grant recipients felt that generative AI would reduce language barriers in research by 2030, according to a report released in December