IRB, API, and a PI: When Agents Run the Lab
TL;DR for operators Lab work is mostly not white coats and dramatic discoveries. It is protocol design, ethics paperwork, recruitment settings, data cleaning, model diagnostics, figure formatting, reference checking, and the slow discovery that your beautiful hypothesis has politely declined to exist. That is what makes this paper interesting. Virtuous Machines: Towards Artificial General Science presents an agentic AI system that did not merely write a speculative research proposal. It designed and executed an online human-participant experiment, collected data through Prolific and Pavlovia, analysed the results, produced figures and tables, wrote manuscripts, and ran peer-style review over the outputs.1 ...