Some LASIGE researchers took part in the 24th edition of Pathways to Complexity, held on 9 July 2025 at the Convento da Arrábida, organized by the Institute of Biosystems and Integrative Sciences and supported by CIÊNCIAS ULisboa.

The  meeting focused on the impact and implications of Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems (and Data Science in a broader sense) in different areas, including policies, and from a societal perspective.

Cátia Pesquita, LASIGE integrated member, aware of the benefits and threats is optimistic about the use of AI in science and everyday activities, but pointed out that “AI has been used to test areas that are already known and is very rarely tested to deal with the unknown”, “Science presupposes the constant alteration of scientific knowledge and often produces conflicts”, and “Doing science without humans ‘isn’t science’ and risks being just an ‘accumulation of facts’”.

On the other hand, André Falcão, PhD Collaborator at LASIGE and an integrated member of BioISI, was less optimistic, warning ‘Our knowledge as experts runs the risk of not being worth much in a while’ and illustrating this with the results of a test that put several experts through a first set of correct and unaltered scientific article summaries, and a second set of forged article summaries with incorrect conclusions. In the end, it turned out that the AI models that interpreted all this information beat the human experts in detecting flaws and inconsistencies in the falsified articles.

Reflections and different perspectives resulting from the complexity of the subject.

Photos credits: DCI CIÊNCIAS