ChatGPT 'lacked depth and insight,' say prestigious science journal editors

Barbara Treutlein, left, and Patrick Cahan, guest editors of the prestigious journal Stem Cell Reports, posed questions about computational systems biology to OpenAI's ChatGPT. Sometimes the answers the program gave were inaccurate, but even when they weren't, ChatGPT had a tendancy to demonstrate "a glaring lack of depth and insight."

Cell Press

Much ink has been spilled of late about the tremendous promise of OpenAI's ChatGPT program for generating natural-language utterances in response to human prompts. 

There's also been much written about the drawbacks of the system including its production of outright falsehoods in published articles. The journal Nature reports that the program does not meet the criteria for authorship of scholarly articles "because they cannot take responsibility for the content and integrity of scientific papers," meaning, the programs.

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There is another, more subtle limitation to ChatGPT that some scholars are discovering: its output can tend to have a banal, overly general, uninformative quality even when the program is not inaccurate. 

That's what editors Barbara Treutlein and Patrick Cahan discovered when they used ChatGPT to help them write an editorial for the scholarly journal Stem Cell Reports, a publication of the science publishing giant Cell Press. The editorial was posted online on January 10th.

The editors posed to ChatGPT various basic questions about the field of computational systems biology. The point was to demonstrate "how advances in computation … can help practitioners across the broader stem cell research enterprise: by saving time and thus freeing us to do more research!"

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