Scientific communication in the era of the Genai: between confidence, truth and transformation
April 16, 2025
What does generative artificial intelligence mean for the future of Scicomm? Dive deeper into our workshop on May 1.
Discover the current trends in scientific communication and activities related to scientific communication around the University of Maryland, Baltimore (UMB) at Scicomm Spotlight, the monthly column of the Scientific Communication Certificate Program (SCICOMM) at the University of Maryland. To see the previous columns Scicomm spotlight, visit The program website.
What if Bill Nye or Neil Degrasse Tyson turns out to be avatars generated by Genai? Would we be confident in the same way that we trust these two people? What differentiates the information created by communicators in experienced sciences and trained from information created by important languages of languages, automatic learning systems trained in massive text data sets to generate human language, applications and tools like Chatgpt and Copilot, to name only two of the many available at the moment, are based? In addition, as an educator and practitioner of scientific communication, I feel a deep commitment to a conscious link with our natural resources. And if Recent reports on the energy needs of Genai -based structures It is believed that the impact of the increase in the integration of Genai tools and applications in daily operations in many areas is deeply worrying. How to balance my commitment to sustainability and environmental justice with growing demand and even the interest of integrating the GENAI in my daily workflow?
These questions are part of a wider calculation with the promise and danger of Genai in our professional life. As an educator of scientific communication, I frequently ask myself these questions and others. But this is where I think that many of us can get along: the growth of generative artificial intelligence (or Genai for a small) technology has stormed the world. The jury is always on the question of whether this storm will transform our education system for the best, just like a hurricane to go up on the coast for a hot summer in Maryland can leave the fresh and windy air – or if it disentagates everything on its way. Probably, reality will be that Genai, and that many, many applications on which everyone in the world of technology cannot wait to throw money, will not be there for a while, and neither the Savior nor Doomsday metaphors will be our realities.
Like many conversations around Genai affecting higher education, the Genai has also drawn the attention of those who seek and practiced scientific communication. Scientific communication (sometimes abbreviated with the ransacking of the SCICMMANT), defined as describing communication on science with individuals and groups outside of traditional research circles, was first claimed as a discipline in the early 1950s. Today, we understand the commitment of scientific communication with the public and the main stakeholders such as politicians on research and scientific innovations as well as learning informational sciences (ISL), mainly among the population of kindergarten at 12 “Go to the heart of scientific communication: a guide to an effective commitment. “”
I sometimes find myself having the impression of having the cervical boost between the two opposite ends of what I like to call the spectrum of the Genai: complete refusal on the one hand, to finish the adoption on the other. In this spectrum, I recognize that the GENAI can improve accessibility and understanding of scientific research, especially for the public public with a less in -depth understanding of the scientific process. At the same time, there are legitimate concerns that the content generated by Genai could increase disinformation. In the context of scientific communication, this information can add to the growing distrust of science and scientists. In addition, the content generated by Genai can be subject to biases and does not represent various voices and experiences, in particular those of marginalized communities whose stories and experiences are often not represented in a large part of the source material on which large language models supplying Genai platforms rest for information.
Some of the central questions occupying practitioners and researchers of the scicomms are:
- How will the Genai affect the dissemination of scientific research in content?
- Will this add to the wider dissemination of science to a large audience and will help access to content and scientific processes?
- Will this become a tool in the diversion of science and scientific research for people’s own political programs?
- Will this contribute better access to marginalized groups to scientific knowledge and participation in the scientific company?
- Will he continue to empower those who are already autonomous and to leave people already marginalized by historical systems of oppression and exclusion even more behind?
More importantly, I think of the implications of Genai tools replacing human creators with various content. There seems to be more and more evidence that employers turn to Genai to replace human employees with more effective Genai tools, Especially for entry -level jobs. An article in Time quotes an exasperated CEO of an advertising company which “has given up employing young people. It is too much effort (…) The pussy can do the job more effectively, it can also plan my vacation and it is not always turned off for hen nights, appointments with the doctor and the days of mental health ”(one hen is the British version of a Bachelorette party).
Genai seems to be more effective in certain tasks than human writers, as A recent study seems to suggest. This 2024 study, published in Pnas Nexus, involving more than 250 lay readers in the comparison of summaries generated by AI compared to the summaries written by scientists, shows how Genai tools seem to create summaries of scientific research which have been perceived as more reliable and lead to a better reminder of information between readers. Of course, I wonder if summaries created by those trained in scientific communication practices, with an in-depth understanding of writing not only as a product, but as a process and a form of interaction and learning, would have been carried out with the summaries created in the Genai or perhaps even outperform them. No lack of respect for American researchers, but many of us lack training and professional development formalized in the effective creation of messages on our own research for public commitment.
In this context, what does Genai tools and applications mean for the future of scientific communication, especially since entry -level positions in scientific communication are beginning to disappear? These entry -level positions play an important role in creating an ecosystem of professionals who support individual researchers and research institutions in the dissemination of their results to a wider audience. Will we always have this flourishing ecosystem if we count on Genai for the production of content instead of doing the work of feeding young minds and inaugurating them in the profession?
While our profession is starting to struggle with the questions that I raise here as well as many other people around Genai and scientific communication, it is encouraging to see the most recent number of The Journal of Science CommunicationPosted on April 14, 2025, is dedicated to “scientific communication in the era of artificial intelligence”. The articles published in this special issue present a range of points of view on the potential and perils of AI in scientific communication from various geographic areas, including France, Germany, the United States, China, Australia, Denmark, Israel, South Korea and Taiwan and the United States. Adding to this collection of 10 studies, a review of the literature on the articles of three main scientific communication journals, carried out by the publishers of this issue, reveals that a large part of the existing research on scientific communication and AI is dominated by an accent on the perceptions of the AI public. What is absent for the moment is an in -depth exploration of the way in which scientific communicators engage with AI, in particular the Genai, and what Genai has an impact on scientific communication ecosystems.
In the end, scientific communicators tell of science stories to a different and diverse audience. If the content generated by Genai on science increases, would we always have a diversified representation of the voices, given the convincing research On the content generated by Genai producing disinformation on marginalized groups? As scientific communicators, we are deeply concerned about public engagement with science and telling engaging stories about scientific research and its impact on the well-being of humanity. How do we continue to do this with the advent of Genai?
If you are interested in exploring these problems, the Scientific communication certificate program in Umb organizes a one -hour workshop on “Navigation of AI in scientific communication: challenges and opportunities“From 12 p.m. to 1 p.m. Thursday, May 1, 2025, on Zoom. Join me, current and former students of the program for a critical conversation informed by research on the capacities and limits of the GENAI in SCICOMM. This interactive workshop explores how tools like Chatgpt and Copilot are used in scientific journalism, in terms of overcoming and an academy, and what it means for precision, copilot, ethics, professional security and the public.
Isabell CSERNO May, PHD, is an associate professor at the University of Maryland School of Graduate Studies, where she directs and teaches in the scientific communication certificate program. Can also lead the UMB writing center and is passionate about accessible and engaging pedagogies.