Machine Discovery and Creation (MDAC)

The MDAC (Machine Discovery and Creation) was a short 6-month pilot project (March-August 2023) that focused on philosophical, epistemological and ethical questions raised by artificial intelligence (AI) in two areas: in science, AI is now used for a variety of knowledge-generating tasks, such as predicting protein structures for developing new drugs or restoring ancient inscriptions and making inferences about past societies. And in creative pursuits, generative AI is increasingly used to produce novel and convincing text and imagery for a variety of artistic and commercial purposes.

MDAC made philosophical contributions to a range of novel conceptual, ethical and legal questions raised by these developments, such as: can machines be 'creators' and 'discoverers'? What attributes and virtues, e.g. imagination, autonomy or humility, do AI systems require to make significant contributions to creative and scientific pursuits? Can generative AI used in science produce evidence, on par with material evidence or expert judgment, or can it merely produce hypotheses we might seek evidence for? 

Our team consisted of:

Dr. Donal Khosrowi (philosophy of science, philosophy of ML/AI)

Dr. Finola Finn (University of Luxembourg; history, methodology, visual and conceptual art, public engagement)

M.A. Elinor Clark (Durham University; philosophy of science, philosophy of ML/AI)

In August 2023, we hosted an interdisciplinary virtual workshop to address core MDAC themes together with legal scholars, computer scientists and humanities scholars. We plan to host a second, follow-up workshop in the future. 

If you're interested in our written work, you can find our first (pre-project) paper, "Decentring the discoverer: how AI helps us rethink scientific discovery", which looks at what role, exactly, AI systems such as AlphaFold may play in scientific discovery in Synthese here.

Our second MDAC paper, "Diffusing the Creator: Attributing Credit for Generative AI Outputs", has been accepted at IACAP 2023 (Prague) and AIES '23 (Montreal) and will appear in the Proceedings of the 2023 AAAI/ACM Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Ethics, and Society (AIES 2023) shortly. You can download the paper here. 

We also wrote up an extended version of this paper that includes a discussion of how GenAI systems like ChatGPT put pressure on the concept of 'authorship' and how we might re-negotiate this concept. This was published in AI and Ethics, and you can find it here.

Our third MDAC paper, "Can generative AI produce scientific evidence?" iwas presented at LICPOS 2023 Lisbon, PSA 2024 New Orleans as well as smaller workshops. It was accepted for publication in the Philosophy of Science contributed papers special issue, forthcoming this fall. You can find a preprint here.

Please get in touch with Donal Khosrowi if you're interested in our project and in collaborating on related themes in the future.