241 papers, zero human authors

Another interesting thing about the paper discussed in item #4, about Dutch nitrogen regulation and residential building, is that it was written completely by AI! It’s part of the Autonomous Policy Evaluation Project (Project APE), an initiative from the Social Catalyst Lab at the University of Zurich. They’ve used AI to generate 241 papers so far, each evaluating the various impacts of some policy with real code and data pulled from official sources, that you can download from github to audit. The Dutch nitrogen paper has some serious issues - many of the figures and citations have been improperly processed and don’t show up correctly in the paper. But AI continues to improve. There’s been a lively debate playing out online about how the ability of AI to churn out papers could break peer review and the journal system; but I found project APE a good reminder of the potential upside: for us, transparent quantitative analysis on every policy for which data is available.