Study Finds AI-Assisted Grant Proposals More Likely to Be Funded, But Less Adventurous

A study from Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management, published in PNAS, indicates that research proposals showing stronger signs of AI-assisted writing were four percentage points more likely to receive funding from the National Institutes of Health (NIH). However, these AI-assisted proposals tended to resemble ideas the agency had already funded, raising concerns that AI could inadvertently steer scientific funding towards more conventional research and potentially narrow the breadth of future scientific discovery.