This study empirically investigates claims of the increasing ubiquity of artificial intelligence (AI) within roughly 80 million research publications across 20 diverse scientific fields, by examining the change in scholarly engagement with AI from 1985 through 2022. We observe exponential growth, with AI-engaged publications increasing approximately thirteenfold (13x) across all fields, suggesting a dramatic shift from niche to mainstream. Moreover, we provide the first empirical examination of the distribution of AI-engaged publications across publication venues within individual fields, with results that reveal a broadening of AI engagement within disciplines. While this broadening engagement suggests a move toward greater disciplinary integration in every field, increased ubiquity is associated with a semantic tension between AI-engaged research and more traditional disciplinary research. Through an analysis of tens of millions of document embeddings, we observe a complex interplay between AI-engaged and non-AI-engaged research within and across fields, suggesting that increasing ubiquity is something of an oil-and-water phenomenon -- AI-engaged work is spreading out over fields, but not mixing well with non-AI-engaged work.

翻译：本研究通过考察1985年至2022年间学者对人工智能（AI）的参与度变化，实证分析了约8000万篇涵盖20个不同科学领域的研究文献中人工智能日益普及的论断。我们观察到指数级增长：所有领域中涉及AI的出版物增长了约十三倍（13倍），表明AI已从边缘领域急剧转向主流。此外，我们首次实证检验了单个学科内AI相关出版物在发表平台上的分布情况，结果显示各学科内部对AI的参与度正在拓宽。尽管这种拓宽的参与度表明每个领域都朝着更深入的学科融合方向发展，但日益增长的普及性也伴随着AI相关研究与更传统学科研究之间的语义张力。通过对数千万文献嵌入向量的分析，我们观察到领域内及跨领域中AI相关与非AI相关研究之间复杂的相互作用，表明日益增长的普及性在某种程度上呈现出“油水不相融”的现象——AI相关工作正在各领域扩散，但未能与非AI相关工作充分融合。