Scientific-Integrity Theft by Artificial Intelligence
The saga to preserve my scientific integrity against deception by artificial intelligence (AI) started two months ago and was described during that period by a Futurism news article here, an essay I posted here, and an interview with Gadi Schwartz on NBC News here.
Throughout this period, I received thousands of emails from fans who alerted me to YouTube channels displaying fake AI-generated videos of me speaking about science. Many of my fans identified the deception because the hands of the clock behind me did not move and because some statements in the videos contradicted what I wrote in my daily essays at https://avi-loeb.medium.com/
Nevertheless, many others believed what they saw in these videos. Today, I was visited by Abby Rockefeller, the daughter of David Rockefeller and Margaret McGrath, following a kind email that she sent me a few days ago:
“Hello Avi Loeb,
I am a sort of neighbor of yours. Specifically, I live in Cambridge on the other side of the Cambridge Common from where you work. I am, on the other hand, one of the at least thousands — maybe hundreds of thousands of people — who want to meet you, who want to talk to you; and, of course, be talked to by you! I am an 82-year-old woman. I have been following your thinking about 3I/ATLAS since the middle of August and I admire it (your thinking). May I visit you in your office? Doesn’t have to be soon, but sometime, I hope.
Abby”
Our conversation was delightful and spanned a wide range of ways by which humanity can do better than it does right now. One of these ways involved the love of nature that Abby and I share. Abby owns a farm and I grew up on a farm. The most profound expression of my love of nature is manifested by my desire to know everything about our cosmic neighborhood through the collection and interpretation of scientific evidence.
But Abby also came to tell me that she watched an intellectually-appealing video in which I made a lot of sense and then said that we detected a message from the interstellar object 3I/ATLAS in which its passengers stated that they decided not to visit Earth because they are disappointed by humanity. Abby resonated with the idea and immediately shared the video with her friend group, but her excitement was diminished when one of them pointed out that the video was faked by AI. She wished to tell me about the roller coaster experience that she went through.
This new reality in which fake content spreads scientific misinformation is akin to identity theft. The deception communicated by creators of fake AI content represents the biggest threat to the scientific endeavor whose foundation is rooted in integrity, truthfulness and evidence. Scientists can be wrong as they make mistakes based on limited information like any human, but they must never deceive the public intentionally. Fake content is intentionally misleading and imposes an injury to scientific integrity.
In addition to AI creations, the online ecosystem is full of blog posts and videos created by unqualified influencers or science communicators who had not written a single scientific paper in decades. Yet, they masquerade as professors or protectors of scientific truth and attack real practitioners of science like myself, even though my scientific career spans 46 years out of which I was a Harvard professor for 33 years during which I wrote more than a thousand scientific papers and nine books. The fact that these posts get millions of views suggests that their creators can fool the public by pretending to be authorities on scientific matters, in the spirit of the fake AI-generated videos.
In a recent WROLD.MINDS forum organized by the brilliant Rolf Dobelli, I asked the chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov: “What is the fundamental difference between chess and politics? Is politics chess on steroids?” Garry explained that while in chess the rules are obeyed by all participants and the status of the chess board is known to everyone, politics involves deception and takes advantage of ignorance. The same is true about the difference between practicing science and creating fake science communications.
I replied to all the fans who alerted me about the fake YouTube videos that they can find my approved content in my thousands of interviews on podcasts and television broadcasts, as well as in my essays — which are offered for free here to a few million viewers per month and over 130,000 followers.
Abby’s experience was a turning point for me. After she left my office today, I decided to create my authentic YouTube channel which will feature content that I approve of. The channel will go live within a few days and the link for it will be shared in the signature box at the end of my daily essays here. I will use this YouTube channel as my official video outlet and ask YouTube authorities to remove any fake AI-generated videos about me from their platform. I apologize to all my fans who were fooled by the fake videos so far, and salute Abby for inspiring me to move in this new direction.
In the same way that junk food is bad for the physical health of our body, junk intellectual food is bad for the mental health of our brain. Stay tuned and check my new YouTube channel when it comes alive. Its creation reflects my optimism that we can course-correct and improve our life with AI. Like any other tool, AI could be a blessing or a curse depending on whether it is used by good or bad actors. What carries humanity forward is the belief that the future can be better than the past.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Avi Loeb is the head of the Galileo Project, founding director of Harvard University’s — Black Hole Initiative, director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, and the former chair of the astronomy department at Harvard University (2011–2020). He is a former member of the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology and a former chair of the Board on Physics and Astronomy of the National Academies. He is the bestselling author of “Extraterrestrial: The First Sign of Intelligent Life Beyond Earth” and a co-author of the textbook “Life in the Cosmos”, both published in 2021. The paperback edition of his new book, titled “Interstellar”, was published in August 2024.
