The future of ecological research will not be (fully) automated

The recent year has seen the creation of large-scale generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) systems like GPT-4 and LaMDA, which are generating increasingly plausible outputs ranging from reasonable answers to questions, images of well-known people or situations, and convincing conversational exchanges. The most well-known language model, ChatGPT, is raising concerns across all scientific fields, leading to calls for its regulation (Hacker 2023). In this viewpoint, we explore how generative language models interact with the specificities of ecology’s epistemologies.