Author: The Conversation

The risk of students using AI to cheat tends to get a lot of attention – with good reason. A student can simply copy and paste a prompt into a chatbot and receive a polished paragraph, a five-paragraph essay, a lab summary or a reading response almost instantly. Teachers may then be left wondering whether the work reflects the student’s thinking and actual work or what the chatbot generated. An estimated 84% of high school students surveyed said they had used generative artificial intelligence for schoolwork in 2025, according to College Board, a nonprofit that administers the SAT and AP exams. As an assistant professor of school…

Imagine a piece of space debris the size of a hockey puck slams into a Starlink satellite at about 10 kilometres per second. The kinetic energy is equivalent to two kilograms of TNT, or a fully-loaded semi-truck travelling at 100 kilometres an hour. The Starlink satellite sprays out dozens of new debris pieces into an expanding cloud. Other satellites will pass by the new debris within minutes — some will need to manoeuvre to avoid yet another collision. As corporations around the world continue to fill low-Earth orbit with megaconstellations, such collisions are increasingly likely. We have developed something called…

What makes people change their minds, or their behaviour? Social scientists spend a lot of time thinking about this question, and experiments are one of the most powerful ways to answer it. Experiments – testing ideas on real people – take considerable amounts of time and money. Enter large language models (LLMs): artificial intelligence (AI) systems trained to mimic certain kinds of text-based human behaviour based on vast amounts of human-produced text. A new study led by Harvard psychology researcher Ashwini Ashokkumar, published today in Nature, suggests LLMs such as GPT-4 can predict the outcomes of many social science experiments surprisingly well. But the…

The US AI research company Anthropic has become known for building powerful AI models while simultaneously warning about their dangers. Most recently, its executives wrote about the threat posed by “recursive self-improvement”. This is the point when AI systems can improve themselves by themselves, potentially leading to “superintelligence” far beyond human control. “We are not there yet, and recursive self-improvement is not inevitable,” the Anthropic blogpost declared. “But it could come sooner than most institutions are prepared for.” In fact, the idea of recursive self-improvement dates back decades. The British mathematician Irving John Good, who worked with Alan Turing at British codebreaking HQ Bletchley Park, warned in the mid-1960s…

Consider the following scenario. Suzy is 63, recently retired, and trying to decide when to start receiving Social Security and how to manage her retirement savings to minimise the tax hit. She opens an AI chatbot, types in the details and gets a calm, well-organised, and confident answer: Claim now, convert this much, here is the reasoning. The chatbot sounds authoritative and even shows its work. So Suzy follows its guidance and never calls a financial planner. Maybe the advice was fine. But maybe it quietly ignored the fact that Suzy’s spouse is younger and in poor health, which can flip the Social Security…

Young people in low- and middle-income countries appear generally more optimistic about how AI can enhance their work prospects and social lives than their Western peers, according to our new survey of people in ten countries in Africa and South Asia. While debates in higher-income countries often focus on job losses, misinformation and mental health risks, many of the 1,864 young adults we surveyed (all aged 18-35) placed more emphasis on the opportunities artificial intelligence tools present for them. In particular, nearly 80% of our participants expect AI to deliver improved education and learning for them. Until now, there has been little evidence of how young people…

When I talk to my son, an engineering student, and we have a question or disagreement, he immediately turns to ChatGPT as his primary source of information and confirmation. He is not alone in this. The use of generative AI tools has exploded across different demographic groups. For many people, these tools can be entertaining, informative and beneficial. However, they also have a dark side. Generative AI is not formally recognised as addictive right now – the medical evidence is still being gathered. But there is a significant amount of data showing heavy use of chatbots and other systems that produce text,…

Earlier this year in Beijing, a humanoid robot crossed a half-marathon finish line in a blistering 50 minutes, 26 seconds. The feat immediately lit up global headlines for shattering the human world record by almost seven minutes. This performance came with many asterisks. The robot followed a pre-mapped track, stayed in its own dedicated lane, and had a human support crew trailing behind it in case something broke. But the performance gap didn’t just close; it evaporated – down from over 2.5 hours in 2025. This wasn’t just about better motors or lighter carbon fibre; it reflected a massive shift in what a robot…

By 2050, scientists estimate that antibiotic-resistant infections will be associated with more than eight million deaths around the world every year. These are bacterial infections that resist traditional antibiotics like penicillin. They can develop when you eat contaminated food, have an open wound or undergo surgery. E. coli is a good example, as several strains have become highly resistant to conventional antibiotics. They can also arrive as secondary infections, like pneumonia after a virus. We need new antibiotics and designing them is difficult. It can take 10 years and more than one billion dollars to bring just one new drug to market. And 10 out…

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) is changing the fitness industry: people can now ask chatbots to write marathon plans, build gym programs and even adjust workouts based on sleep or heart rate data. For many, AI feels like the future of fitness coaching because it is fast, cheap and readily available. But while AI can be helpful, research suggests it still has limitations, especially when compared with experienced human coaches. So, let’s look at how it all works and the pros and cons. Why are people using AI for training? There is very little research examining exactly why people use AI for exercise…