Sunnylands, in partnership with the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the Annenberg Public Policy Center (APPC) at the University of Pennsylvania, convened an in-person retreat on February 8-10, 2024, about ways for the scientific community to respond to the perils and promises of artificial intelligence (AI).

Building on a virtual retreat on November 29-30, 2023, and on a half-dozen papers commissioned by APPC, the 30 Sunnylands participants agreed upon the outline of a statement calling both for creation of an NAS Strategic Council to monitor the fidelity of AI innovation to scientific norms and for creation of discipline-specific monitoring structures as well.

The two-stage retreat generated the editorial, “Protecting scientific integrity in an age of generative AI,” published May 21, 2024, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), in which an interdisciplinary group of experts urged the scientific community to follow five principles of human accountability and responsibility when using AI in research.

Papers commissioned for the retreat that explored various aspects of AI and its use and governance were digested in the journal, Issues of Science and Technology. The papers will form the basis of a forthcoming book to be published by the University of Pennsylvania Press.

Participants at the retreat included Nobel laureates David Baltimore, Saul Perlmutter, and Harold Varmus; the presidents of the U.S. and German National Academies of Sciences, respectively, Marcia McNutt and Gerald Haug; Microsoft’s chief scientific officer, Eric Horvitz; Vinton Cerf, the chief internet evangelist at Google, who is widely considered one of the fathers of the internet; and Susan Ness, a former of commissioner of the Federal Communications Commission, APPC distinguished fellow, and former head of the Transatlantic Working Group.