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Artificial Intelligence Can Generate Plausible, Entertaining, and Scientifically Interesting Titles for Research Articles:

Artificial intelligence (AI) technology can generate plausible, entertaining, and scientifically interesting titles for potential research articles, finds a study in the Christmas issue of The BMJ.

A study of The BMJ's most popular Christmas research articles — which combine evidence based science with light hearted or quirky themes — finds that AI generated titles were as attractive to readers but that, as in other areas of medicine, performance was enhanced by human input.

[...] AI is already used to help doctors diagnose conditions, based on the idea that computer systems can learn from data and identify patterns. But can AI be used to generate worthwhile hypotheses for medical research?

To find out, the researchers used the titles of The BMJ's 13 most-read Christmas research articles of the past 10 years to prompt similar AI generated titles, which they scored for scientific merit, entertainment, and plausibility.

The 10 highest and 10 lowest scoring AI generated titles were then combined with 10 real Christmas research articles and were rated by a random sample of 25 doctors from a range of specialties in Africa, Australia, and Europe.

The results show that AI generated titles were rated at least as enjoyable (64% v 69%) and attractive (70% v 68%) as real titles, although the real titles were rated as more plausible (73% v 48%).

The AI generated titles overall were rated as having less scientific or educational merit than the real titles (58% v 39%), however this difference became non-significant when humans curated the AI output (58% v 49%).

Journal Reference:
Robin Marlow, Dora Wood. Ghost in the machine or monkey with a typewriter [open], BMJ (DOI: 10.1136/bmj-2021-067732)

Original Submission