PYRO workshop: AI in young researchers' lives

Thank you all for joining us at the dedicated AI workshop meeting. We apology for the technical difficulties with Auditorium 4 but the move to Auditorium 7 turned out to be a good choice for space considering the high number of participants (for than 50 registered participants).

PYRO held a hands-on workshop on the use of AI in research on Wednesday 14 October 2026, from 10:00 to 15:00. The session followed a suggestion from last year's PYRO seminar to make the AI topic more active, and it was aimed at researchers whose project drafts, grant ideas or manuscripts keep getting pushed aside by more urgent tasks.

The day opened with Marko Lukic (UiT), who gave an update on UiT's AI tools and guided participants through the data safety guidelines for responsible AI use in research, data analysis, and the preparation of manuscripts and grant proposals.

Guest speaker Razvan Chereches, an experienced EU grant evaluator and expert in AI applications, then led an interactive working session. He took real material submitted by participants, such as article drafts, grant ideas and methods sections, and developed it live with AI. The workflow ran from the first structured prompt to a text  and showed where AI fails and what to check before trusting its output.

Participants shared a nice lunch with plenty of discussion before the final talk.

Matthias Mittner (IPS) closed the day with a more sceptical perspective on how AI tools affect cognition. Drawing on research on attention and cognition, he discussed cognitive offloading, the risk of losing a sense of agency over one's own work, and what it means for researchers when thinking itself is delegated.