ChatGPT on Mars: How AI can help scientists study the Red Planet

The world is abuzz, perhaps even befuddled, about the growing use of artificial intelligence. One of the most popular artificial intelligence (AI) tools available to the public today is ChatGPT, an AI-powered language model that has been "trained" and fed vast amounts of online information. After taking all that in, ChatGPT can regurgitate human-like text responses to a given prompt. It can respond to queries, discuss a lot of topics and crank out pieces of writing.

It isn't difficult to imagine a robot wheeling and dealing on the surface of Mars, factory-wired with ChatGPT or a similar artificial intelligence language model. This smartbot could be loaded with a suite of science devices. It could analyze what its scientific instruments are finding "on-the-spot," perhaps even collating any evidence of past life it uncovers nearly instantly.

That data could be digested, assessed, appraised and assembled in some scientific form. The product, in well-paginated condition, with footnotes to boot, could then be transmitted directly from the robot to a scientific journal, like Science or Nature, for publication. Of course, that paper would then be peer reviewed — maybe by AI/ChatGPT reviewers. Sound far-fetched?

I reached out to several leading researchers, presenting this off-Earth, on-Mars scenario, with a variety of reactions in return.

Related: Artificial intelligence could help hunt for life on Mars and other alien worlds

Prone to hallucination

"It could be done but there could be misleading information," said Sercan Ozcan, Reader in Innovation and Technology Management at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom. "ChatGPT is not 100% accurate and it is prone to 'hallucination.'"

Ozcan said he's not sure if ChatGPT would be valuable if there is no prior volume of work for it to analyze and emulate. "I believe humans can still do better work than ChatGPT, even if it is slower," he said.

His advice is to not use ChatGPT "in areas where we cannot accept any error."

Humans in the loop

Steve Ruff, associate research professor at Arizona State University's School of Earth and Space Exploration in Tempe, Arizona, is keenly tied to studying Mars.

"My immediate reaction is that it's highly unlikely that 'on-the-spot' manuscripts would be a realistic scenario given how the process involves debates among the team over the observations and their interpretation," Ruff said. "I'm skeptical that any AI, trained on existing observations, could be used to confidently interpret new observations without humans in the loop, especially with new instrument datasets that have not been available previously. Every such dataset requires painstaking efforts to sort out."

For the near term, Ruff thinks AI could be used for rover operations, like picking targets to observe without humans in the loop, and for navigation.

First things first

In what world do we want to live? 

Perhaps that is the strongest question, said Nathalie Cabrol, Director of the Carl Sagan Center for Research at the SETI Institute in Mountain View, California. 

"First things first," Cabrol said. "AI is a formidable tool and should be used as such to support humans in their activity. We actually do that already every day, in one form or another," she added, "and improved versions might make things better." 

On the other hand, like any human tools, they are double-edged swords and sometimes lead people to start thinking "nonsense," Cabrol added, and she believes that to be the case here.

"I do personally like writing papers. It is a great time where I see my work coming to fruition and can put my ideas together on paper," Cabrol said, and sees that as an important part of her creative process.

"But let's assume for a moment that I let this algorithm write it for me. Then, I am being told that it's okay because the paper will be reviewed," Cabrol said. "But by whom? I would assume that if you let algorithms do the job for you it's because you assume they will be less biased and do a better job? Following that logic, I would assume that a human is not qualified to review that paper." 

Specters of "transhumanism"

Cabrol senses that a next question is: Where do we stop? What if all researchers ask AI to write their research grant proposals? What if they do and don't tell?

"This depends in which world you want to live and what part you want left to humanity," Cabrol said. "We are creative beings and we are not perfect," she continued, "but we learn from our mistakes and that's part of our evolution. Mistake and learning are other words for 'adaptation'," she said. 

By letting AI getting into what makes us human, we are messing with our own evolution, Cabrol added, and she sees specters of "transhumanism" in all of this. Transhumanism can be defined as a loose ideological movement united by the belief that the human race can evolve beyond its current physical and mental limitations, especially by means of science and technology. 

"Of course, that's not a chip in our brain and that's only a paper, you will say. Unfortunately, it is part of a much broader, and very disturbing, discourse on the (mis) use of AI," Cabrol concluded. "This is not trivial. It is not just a paper. It is about who we really want to become as a species. Personally, I see AI useful as a tool, and I will confine it as that."

Knowledge cutoff

"How funny that we still argue about the definition of life as we know it, and we're starting to use a tool in that search that also stretches the definition of life," said Amy Williams, assistant professor in Geological Sciences at the University of Florida in Gainesville. She is a participating scientist on the NASA Curiosity and Perseverance rover missions that have robots scouting about on Mars.

Williams reacted to the AI-ChatGPT off-world setting in full disclosure mode. "The first time I used ChatGPT was in preparing for this response, asking it: 'What organic molecules have the Mars rovers found?' The question was based on my particular field of expertise," she told Space.com. 

"It was illuminating in that it did a great job providing me with statements that I would describe as robust and appropriate for a summary that I could give in an outreach talk to the general public about organic molecules on Mars," said Williams. 

But it also demonstrated to Williams its limitation in that it could only access data from, in her case, September 2021 — flagging it as a "knowledge cutoff." 

"So its responses did not encompass the full breadth of published results about organics on Mars that I know about since 2021," she said. 

Emphasizing that she is not a specialist in AI or machine learning, Williams said that future iterations of ChatGPT + AI will likely be able to incorporate more recent data and generate a complete synthesis of the recent results from any given scientific exploration.

"However, I still see these as tools to use in step with humans, instead of in place of humans," Williams remarked. "Given the limitations in data uplink and downlink with our current Deep Space Network, it is difficult for me to see a way to upload the knowledge base for something as complex as, for example, the current and historic data and context for the sources, sinks, and fates of organic molecules on Mars so that the onboard AI could generate a manuscript for publication," she said.

Putting it into context

Williams views cutting edge planetary research as something that requires "retrospection, introspection and prospection." We push forward the boundaries of science by considering options, she added, that have never before been considered. 

"Right now, my experience with ChatGPT showed me it is great at a literature search and turning that information into, effectively, an annotated bibliography. It could certainly save me time in looking up fundamental knowledge. It told me what we already know — and typed it up very nicely! — but it was not anything that any Mars organic geochemistry graduate student couldn't tell me."

In the end, Williams said that while ChatGPT + AI is a powerful tool that can positively augment the process of conveying information and new discoveries, "I don't see it replacing the human-driven process of synthesizing new information and putting it into context to generate new insights into science. However, if every AI sci-fi movie I've seen is predictive of the future, I may be wrong!"