This comment made me realize something. There’s always been grumbling in the academic community about how negative or less exciting results aren’t publishable. As a result, there is quite a bit of knowledge that is essentially “lost” as no one ever bothers to write it down. Part of the reason this happens is that publishing unexciting results is unhelpful professionally, but I suspect another aspect here is that researchers know that no one would read such results; it is hard enough to keep up with the positive results in the field, much less negative results. So, in that sense they are not “contributing to the sum total of human knowledge”, which I think is a major part of many scientists’ motivations.

So then, in a world where the outcomes of all experiments could be reasonably fed into an AI model, it seems that there could be a great deal of value in having scientists publish these “low value” negative results, even in a relatively informal format (i.e. not worrying about formatting, perhaps skipping peer review, etc.). That way even if a human never reads the paper, at the very least an AI “scientist” model would pick it up.

I don’t think you can professionally incentivize this. Rather, scientists would need to do this out of the desire to contribute to the sum total of human knowledge, which could be embodied and not forgotten by these scientist AI’s.