What is darapskite? Some reflections on how artificial intelligence could promote an academic gap

The rise of artificial intelligence (AI) has provoked polarized reactions, from being hailed as the unavoidable way for diverse new opportunities to those that consider it another end-of-the-world crisis, perhaps feeded by many fiction works referring to how when artificial intelligence becomes dominant, one of its logic-based decision will be the extermination of humankind (e.g., to preserve the planet).

Most users will see artificial intelligence as a tool with potentialities and risks. Trying to contribute to this discussion, we attempt to assess the use of artificial intelligence in relation to a specific question that can be considered relatively obscure in general terms but with some relevance in our research area.

We asked "What is darapskite?" (literally) to around twenty Android AI apps.

Darapskite is an hydrated salt mineral, which, as shown by the results obtained with search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing or Duckduckgo, has an ideal chemical formula with sodium, nitrate and sulfate (besides water), named after Ludwig Darapsky and initially described in Chilean nitrate deposits.

The answers from the vast majority of AI apps were wrong. One app described darapskite as a crypto currency but the most mortifying answers were those that correctly refer to darapskite as a mineral and then presented wrong information about it, errors that showed a significant diversity. There were mistakes in relation to the chemical composition, the date of darapskite definition, the defining locality, the origin of the name, the economic value, the applications and the geological context where darapskite is found.

These results seem to support one of the main charges leveled against artificial intelligence; these apps might be, to use an American cliché, "making things up".

In a kind of analogy with the intersectionality framework used in the social sciences, this could cause especially significant impacts on less skeptical, more socially isolated, poorer students of less recondite study areas, with the risk of contributing to an academic gap in relation to more critically-minded, socially connected, richer students from more prominent areas of knowledge.