ECO.EVO.EDU: Human Connection and Knowledge in the Age of AI

Talk description

AI tools now make it easy to produce polished manuscripts, reviews, and syntheses, and journals are seeing the result as rising submission volumes and eroding quality signals. This talk draws on a recent Biological Conservation perspective and on observations from editorial practice to examine what is lost when content is generated without an intellectual and emotional process: the cycle of probing, doubting, and reconsidering analyses builds a researcher’s connection to their work and the satisfaction of creating something new. In this webinar I will highlight the parts of science that AI cannot replace, including novel data, judgement, and the relationships that shape ideas, and invite discussion on how we keep these at the centre of research and publishing.

Speaker:

Amanda Bates is a Professor of Biology at the University of Victoria, and Director of the Canadian Institute of Ecology and Evolution. Her research combines diverse data in historical time series to identify the most probable causes of where and when species occur, with work spanning thermal tolerance, species redistribution, biodiversity monitoring, and biodiversity change. She is Co-Editor-in-Chief of Global Ecology and Biogeography, serves on the editorial board of Biological Conservation.