Author: The Conversation

Amy, a 27-year-old software developer, has struggled with disordered eating since she was a teenager. “But after learning to code, I got much better,” she said in a research interview. “I often code for ten or more hours without stopping.” Her psychiatrist, however, worried that Amy has replaced one compulsive behaviour with another. “Digital addiction” is often used to describe our relationship with smartphones, social media and other digital technologies. This way of thinking suggests that people get “hooked” on digital activity because their body becomes “addicted” to dopamine. It borrows from models of substance addiction: the focus is on the physical need…

Tech giant Meta will pay up to roughly US$18 billion, plus make major design changes to Facebook and Instagram, as part of a settlement it has agreed to in its most recent lawsuit. Filed in 2023 by a coalition of 29 US state attorneys general, the case alleged that Instagram and Facebook were engineered to keep teenagers hooked, that Meta misled the public about the harm, and that it collected data from children under 13 without parental consent. The trial began just over a week ago. But instead of battling it out in court for four more weeks, the parties agreed to settle.…

If you spend any amount of time on LinkedIn, you’ll have certainly come across this type of phrasing: “This isn’t a job, it’s a calling” or “This isn’t marketing, it’s a movement” or “This isn’t a tool, it’s a paradigm shift.” This sentence structure is saturating posts on the platform. It’s become one of the most recognisable patterns of AI-generated text: “It’s not X, it’s Y.” If you’re like me, you find it annoying and scroll past as soon as you read it. Your exasperation is warranted. Negation can be a powerful literary device when used thoughtfully, but when unearned,…

AI is quietly reshaping writing. It’s not just that prose is changing — the very structure of written language is genuinely changing too. It’s not just a new technology. It’s not a fad. It’s an undeniable revolution. Did this article’s introduction seem AI-generated? What made you feel that way? The truth is, it was not AI-generated; I wrote it to emulate synthetic prose, the kind you get when a large language model (LLM) organises words into text. That kind of prose suddenly seems to be everywhere: on low-quality websites built to accumulate advertising clicks, in social media captions chasing engagement, and…

Director James Cameron’s acclaimed sci-fi movie Aliens turns 40 in August. It’s a sequel to Ridley Scott’s claustrophobic breakout hit Alien, made in 1979. Where the original featured one terrifying creature, Cameron’s movie features hundreds – and pits them against a squad of space marines. A host of intriguing technologies make an appearance, including interstellar travel, hypersleep (where humans are preserved in stasis for long space journeys) and terraforming (making other worlds liveable for humans). Some of the technologies in the film have already come to pass – or look likely to soon. But others were missed and some remain firmly in…

“Pics or it didn’t happen” was a thing people used to say online when they wanted to verify a claim. Technology has changed this. We now regularly see a mix of the surreal and the fantastic. World leaders saying things they didn’t. Public figures seemingly endorsing fake products. And disasters that unfold before our eyes but didn’t really happen. Now, anyone can create photorealistic images or videos using AI for a range of purposes. This has changed the nature of visual evidence and our relationship to photos and videos, more broadly. The glut of AI slop we see online is eroding trust in institutions, gobbling up resources, and scamming…

Ever used or thought of using artificial intelligence (AI) for financial advice? Is it a good idea? Anyone with the internet access, even on their phone, can access AI. Tools like ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity are free, instant, and easy to use. They can break down complex financial concepts and provide financial solutions in seconds. But can they safely guide a user through a nuanced, high-stakes financial crisis? Our recent research explored this question, drawing on our financial planning and consumer behaviour expertise. We evaluated how three open-access AI models handled the financial queries of users whose personal situations put them at risk of harm. To…

Concerns about students cheating with AI are rife within schools and universities. Some lecturers have even expressed fears that students have been “lobotomised by AI” amid reports that AI-detection tools are patchy and far from foolproof. Last week, New South Wales moved to ban take-home assignments for Year 12 to try to stop AI use in assessments. At the same time, a major generative AI system has developed a way to “watermark” whether or not a text is AI. Developer Anthropic has announced that the text output of Claude (one of the five big AI tools) will include a hidden label or watermark indicating the…

Do your social media accounts feed you content that reflects your core beliefs and guiding principles? Our new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that the algorithms supplying your feeds may be prioritising content that clashes with your values. That’s because the algorithms heavily weigh online posts that you reply to, and social media users tend to more often comment on content they take issue with than content they agree with. Notably, our study of the X social media platform shows that although the X feed algorithm promotes content to both Democratic and Republican users that…

Water is an amazing substance. The human body is made up of more than 50% water. Approximately 70% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water. We drink it, bathe in it, cook with it, and clean with it. It is also used to cool data centres, which is an increasing draw on what is a scarce resource in many parts of the world. The boom in artificial intelligence (AI) has been fuelling the construction of new data centres worldwide. This is driven by the massive computing workloads required to train and run generative AI models. AI data centres are specialised facilities…