> some could be tempted to slightly alter the data

We even suspect the G. Mendel of altering his pea data, it is unlikely he got results so close to predicted ratios. So it is not "some", everyone is tempted to "clean up" data, be it by removing outliers or by duplicating "good" rows.

> AI would do fairly well

But AI can also hallucinate data. I am not sure this is an area for an automatic "AI is better than humans". Honesty is very important in science. There were even fake articles generated:

https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6...

And some other article I forgot, about arsene or some other ion being used in/for DNA or so. Turned out to be totally fabricated. Right now I don't remember the name of the article; was from some years ago.

I don’t believe fixing this is not something AI would do well.

Identifying it is something AI could do well, though. It’s very good at finding patterns - that’s kind of essential to how it works.