The ongoing artificial intelligence (AI) revolution has the potential to change almost every line of work. As AI capabilities continue to improve in accuracy, robustness, and reach, AI may outperform and even replace human experts across many valuable tasks. Despite enormous effort devoted to understanding the impact of AI on labor and the economy and AI's recent successes in accelerating scientific discovery and progress, we lack a systematic understanding of how AI advances may benefit scientific research across disciplines and fields. Here, drawing from the literature on the future of work and the science of science, we develop a measurement framework to estimate both the direct use of AI and the potential benefit of AI in scientific research, applying natural language processing techniques to 74.6 million publications and 7.1 million patents. We find that the use of AI in research is widespread throughout the sciences, growing especially rapidly since 2015, and papers that use AI exhibit a citation premium, more likely to be highly cited both within and outside their disciplines. Moreover, our analysis reveals considerable potential for AI to benefit numerous scientific fields, yet a notable disconnect exists between AI education and its research applications, highlighting a mismatch between the supply of AI expertise and its demand in research. Lastly, we examine demographic disparities in AI's benefits across scientific disciplines and find that disciplines with a higher proportion of women or Black scientists tend to be associated with less benefit, suggesting that AI's growing impact on research may further exacerbate existing inequalities in science. As the connection between AI and scientific research deepens, our findings may become increasingly important, with implications for the equity and sustainability of the research enterprise.

翻译：当前的人工智能（AI）革命具有改变几乎所有行业的潜力。随着AI能力在准确性、鲁棒性和应用范围上的持续提升，AI可能超越甚至取代人类专家，完成许多高价值任务。尽管已有大量研究致力于理解AI对劳动力与经济的影响，且AI近期在加速科学发现与进步方面取得了显著成功，但我们仍缺乏对AI进步如何跨学科、跨领域惠及科学研究的系统性理解。本文借鉴关于未来工作与科学学的文献，开发了一个测量框架，通过自然语言处理技术分析7460万篇学术出版物和710万项专利，以评估AI在科学研究中的直接使用情况及其潜在益处。我们发现，AI在科学研究中的应用已遍及各个科学领域，且自2015年以来增长尤为迅速；使用AI的论文表现出引用溢价，更有可能在其学科内外获得高引用。此外，我们的分析揭示了AI惠及众多科学领域的巨大潜力，但AI教育与研究应用之间存在显著脱节，凸显了AI专业知识的供给与研究需求之间的不匹配。最后，我们考察了AI益处在不同科学学科中的人口统计学差异，发现女性或黑人科学家比例较高的学科往往与较低的AI获益相关，这表明AI对研究日益增长的影响可能进一步加剧科学中已有的不平等。随着AI与科学研究的联系不断深化，我们的研究发现可能变得愈发重要，并对研究事业的公平性与可持续性产生深远影响。