> It could be either a fat-finger mistake when editing the Excel file or deliberate tampering to cover up real data that didn't tell the right story.
I can easily imagine after spending years or decades devoted to discovering a scientific breakthrough that some could be tempted to slightly alter the data. I believe there was some scandal about this a few years back with climate data. Fixing this is however something that AI would do fairly well.
> AI would do fairly well
But AI can also hallucinate data. I am not sure this is an area for an automatic "AI is better than humans". Honesty is very important in science. There were even fake articles generated:
https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...
And some other article I forgot, about arsene or some other ion being used in/for DNA or so. Turned out to be totally fabricated. Right now I don't remember the name of the article; was from some years ago.
I don’t believe fixing this is not something AI would do well.
Identifying it is something AI could do well, though. It’s very good at finding patterns - that’s kind of essential to how it works.