Short-form science: University of Washington researchers launch PaperTok to combat AI slop
Researchers have a new weapon against scientifically flawed AI that distorts public understanding of complex topics. A University of Washington team is helping scientists tell their stories with a free tool that turns dense, jargon-heavy publications into short, accessible videos.
“There’s a lot of science communication that’s happening in short form — especially on TikTok, but we’re also seeing YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels — these stories that science has discovered,” said Meziah Ruby Cristobal, a UW student studying human-centered design and engineering.
Cristobal and his colleagues created PaperTok in the hope of putting AI to good use – to combat the misuse of technology elsewhere by non-scientists who misrepresent research.
The tool is simple. A researcher uploads a paper to PaperTok, which analyzes it to find attention-grabbing hooks and takeaways that are most relevant to a general audience. The tool generates a script with an opening scene and a narrative arc, generating a 45-second AI-loaded video. It closes with a reference to the paper, including the names of the researchers and the journal, to establish credibility.
Other tools can turn PDFs into videos, but Cristobal said PaperTok is purposely designed to keep people informed. It uses a multi-step process that requires approval at each stage, giving users the ability to edit output down to each word.
Cristobal presented research on PaperTok this spring in Barcelona at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. He co-led the study with fellow doctoral student Donghoon Shin; senior author is UW professor Gary Hsieh.
A team of eight created PaperTok last summer, starting with discussions with science communicators and researchers before developing the tool and gathering user feedback.
“Many researchers have actually found great value in seeing how AI tries to visualize what they believe are abstract concepts,” Cristobal said. For many, it has served as a conceptual tool that highlights new ways of communicating their findings.
There was a critical response as well. Some users said the videos felt “too AI-ish,” pointing out issues like garbled text. The UW team continues to improve PaperTok, including plans to allow researchers to integrate charts and images from their papers into videos.
PaperTok was designed to translate research papers through human computer interaction but was tested on topics including physics, and it held up well. The team wants to expand its reach across all fields of research to create videos for the social sciences and hard sciences alike.
The tool is free to use, but because video production is computationally expensive, the company asks researchers to use a Gemini key so that the costs are charged to their Google account.
