News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:NIH limits scientists to six applications per year by DonsDiscountGas on Monday July 21, 2025 @07:14AM (#44633846)
These are good reasons to allow LLMs but the cap on 6 submissions doesn't seem so bad. If anything it ensures people focus on fewer quality submissions. And if that means less time spent writing proposals, so much the better.
Re:NIH limits scientists to six applications per year by Al-Khwarizmi on Monday July 21, 2025 @07:21AM (#44633898)
Of course, I agree with the cap. In fact, I'm surprised people could submit 40 proposals - in my country, most grant calls are capped to one proposal (since long before LLMs) and the same goes for most EU-wide calls I know. Even without LLMs, I wouldn't see the point of giving someone 40x the chances of funding just because they somehow found the time to write 40 proposals.

My comment was more about the part that says

"Aside from the cap, the policy makes clear that NIH will not consider AI-generated proposals to be the original work of applicants. “NIH will continue to employ the latest technology in detection of AI-generated content to identify AI generated applications,” the agency’s notice says. If AI use is detected after an award has been granted, NIH warns, the agency may refer the matter to the Office of Research Integrity while imposing penalties."

I think it's just unrealistic to expect that scientists won't use LLMs for grant proposals. And detection doesn't even actually work without the risk of false positives (not that there are going to be actual false positives, because everyone is going to use LLMs for this so by definition you will only have true positives and false negatives, but it's still unfair if some scientists' proposals are flagged by an AI detector and others bypass it).