Evaluating science: A comparison of human and AI reviewers

Scientists have started to explore whether novel artificial intelligence (AI) tools based on large language models, such as GPT-4, could support the scientific peer review process. We sought to understand (i) whether AI versus human reviewers are able to distinguish between made-up AI-generated and human-written conference abstracts reporting on actual research, and (ii) how the quality assessments by AI versus human reviewers of the reported research correspond to each other. We conducted a large-scale field experiment during a medium-sized scientific conference, relying on 305 human-written and 20 AI-written abstracts that were reviewed either by AI or 217 human reviewers. The results show that human reviewers and GPTZero were better in discerning (AI vs. human) authorship than GPT-4. Regarding quality assessments, there was rather low agreement between both human–human and human–AI reviewer pairs, but AI reviewers were more aligned with human reviewers in classifying the very best abstracts. This indicates that AI could become a prescreening tool for scientific abstracts. The results are discussed with regard to the future development and use of AI tools during the scientific peer review process.