In a new article published in Artificial Intelligence & Environment, Professor Guang-Guo Ying of South China Normal University examines three landmark AI systems reported in Nature in 2026: the Empirical Research Assistant (ERA), The AI Scientist, and MIRA. Together, they illustrate how AI agents are increasingly able to move from reasoning about scientific problems to taking autonomous actions.
ERA can develop and improve scientific software across fields ranging from single-cell analysis to epidemiological forecasting. The AI Scientist can generate research ideas, write code, conduct experiments, prepare figures, draft manuscripts, and even perform automated peer review. MIRA takes autonomy into medicine, where it can interact with simulated electronic health records, order tests, generate diagnoses, prescribe treatments, and recommend hospital admission.
These achievements suggest that AI is becoming an active participant in scientific discovery rather than simply a tool used by researchers.
"AI scientists could dramatically expand our ability to explore ideas and conduct experiments, but scientific judgment, ethical responsibility, and human oversight remain essential," said Ying. "The goal should not be to replace scientists, but to create a new partnership in which human curiosity and machine scalability complement each other."
The article also highlights serious limitations. Autonomous systems can generate hallucinated citations, incorrect code, duplicated figures, physically impossible results, and outputs that are difficult to reproduce.
Ying argues that the future of science is therefore likely to involve a new division of labor. Humans will define important questions, establish ethical boundaries, evaluate ambiguous findings, and determine which ideas are worth pursuing, while AI handles computationally intensive and repetitive exploration.
The article concludes that the age of the AI scientist has begun, but its future will depend on how the scientific community guides its development toward openness, safety, and responsible discovery.
===
Journal reference: Ying G-G. The AI scientist arrives: a new epoch in autonomous discovery. AI Environ. 2026, 1(3): xx-xx. DOI: 10.66178/aie-0026-0017
https://www.the-newpress.com/aie/article/doi/10.66178/aie-0026-0017
===
About the Journal:
Artificial Intelligence & Environment is an international multidisciplinary platform for communicating advances in fundamental and applied research on the intersection of environmental science and artificial intelligence (AI). It is dedicated to serving as an innovative, efficient and professional platform for researchers in the cross-discipline fields of earth and environmental sciences, big data science and AI around the world to deliver findings from this rapidly expanding field of science. It is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal that publishes critical review, original research, rapid communication, view-point, commentary and perspective papers.
