Screenshots from PaperTok-generated videos. (PaperTok.com Images)
Researchers have a new weapon against the scientifically inaccurate AI slop muddying public understanding of complex topics. A University of Washington team is helping scientists tell their own stories with a free tool that converts dense, jargon-heavy publications into short, accessible videos.
“There’s a lot of science communication happening in short form — primarily on TikTok, but also we’re seeing YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels — these tidbits of science findings,” said Meziah Ruby Cristobal, a UW doctoral student in human centered design and engineering.
Cristobal and her colleagues built PaperTok hoping to use AI for good — to fight the technology’s irresponsible use elsewhere by non-scientists who misrepresent research.
The tool is simple. A researcher uploads a paper into PaperTok, which analyzes it to find attention-grabbing hooks and the most relevant takeaways for a general audience. The tool generates a script with an opening scene and narrative arc, producing a 45-second AI-narrated video. It closes with a reference to the paper, including the researchers’ names and the journal, to establish credibility.
Other tools can turn PDFs into videos, but Cristobal said PaperTok was intentionally designed to keep humans in the loop. It uses a multi-step process that requires approval at each phase, giving users the ability to edit the output down to individual words.
Cristobal presented research on PaperTok this spring in Barcelona at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. She co-led the study with fellow doctoral student Donghoon Shin; the senior author is UW professor Gary Hsieh.
Lead contributors on the University of Washington’s PaperTok study, from left: Gary Hsieh, UW professor in human centered design and engineering; and UW doctoral students Meziah Ruby Cristobal and Donghoon Shin. Cristobal presented the findings at the Association for Computing Machinery’s Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems in Barcelona. (Photo courtesy of Cristobal)
A team of eight built PaperTok last summer, starting with interviews with science communicators and researchers before developing the tool and gathering user feedback.
“A lot of the researchers actually found huge value in seeing how the AI tries to visualize what they believe to be very abstract concepts,” Cristobal said. For many, it served as a brainstorming tool that highlighted new ways to communicate their findings.
There was critical feedback as well. Some users said the videos felt “too AI-ish,” pointing to issues like nonsense text. The UW team is continuing to refine PaperTok, including plans to let researchers incorporate charts and graphics from their papers into the videos.
PaperTok was built to translate research papers on human-computer interaction but has been tested on topics including physics, and it held up well. The team wants to expand its reach across research disciplines to create videos for social sciences and hard sciences alike.
The tool is free to use, but because video generation is computationally expensive, the company asks researchers to use a Gemini key so the cost is charged to their Google account.
