I don't want to say that there's no possible role for AI in Life research, but it's hard to see how something like ChatGPT can be helpful.
1) The placement of a single cell in a huge pattern will very often make the difference between a working Life pattern and something that catastrophically implodes. So making a generative AI like ChatGPT do any work on Conway's Life is very much like making it play chess: sooner rather than later, something really important will end up slightly out of place, and ChatGPT will have no way of knowing.
2) Unlike a lot of other subjects where ChatGPT really shines, Conway's Life is an incredibly niche subject. There simply isn't anywhere near enough training data for ChatGPT to give reliable results, even for fairly basic questions:
3) However, there are definitely a number of areas of Life research where other types of AI might end up coming in very handy -- e.g., in monitoring and tuning parameters for very long-running and difficult searches. For this we need something much less like ChatGPT and more like Douglas Lenat's EURISKO, to try new experiments and learn what it can from the results ... EURISKO also happened to come up on Hacker News today:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40128285
We just can't rely on generative AI to re-shuffle what is already known and make it into a nice new package, when what we're searching for is something that's never been seen before.
