Artificial Intelligence Meets IS Researchers: Can It Replace Us?

In the era of accelerating digitization and rapid advances in Artificial Intelligence (AI), increasingly more job tasks may be automated by AI. However, there is little critical analysis of how this will happen, if at all, and to what kind of professions to greater or lesser extents. A few studies suggest that highly creative and knowledge-intensive tasks cannot be substituted by AI. Yet, there have been examples of creative art pieces generated by AI algorithms that even art critics could not distinguish from human-drawn paintings. As IS (and most other) researchers, we pride ourselves on the scarcity, novelty, and creativity of our work. In this context, this panel debated the critical question for IS academics-whether AI can and will replace our major activity, IS research,-or even us IS researchers.