Author: The Conversation

You might not know it from the headlines, but there is some good news about the global fight against climate change. A decade ago, the cheapest way to meet growing demand for electricity was to build more coal or natural gas power plants. Not anymore. Solar and wind power aren’t just better for the climate; they’re also less expensive today than fossil fuels at the utility scale, and they’re less harmful to people’s health. Yet renewable energy projects face headwinds, including in the world’s fast-growing developing countries. I study energy and climate solutions and their impact on society, and I see ways to…

It’s a common scene on public transport. A parent holds a mobile phone showing noisy cartoons to their young child. The pair is looking at the screen together, laughing. Yet parent and child rarely exchange a gaze or look out across the landscape. While many parents can relate to such moments, this is just an example of how technology (mainly digital screens but also vocal assistants, domestic robots and so on) has become part of our daily routines, changing the way we interact and engage with the world around us and – most importantly – with each other. But how does…

Every year, companies and space agencies launch hundreds of rockets into space – and that number is set to grow dramatically with ambitious missions to the Moon, Mars and beyond. But these dreams hinge on one critical challenge: propulsion – the methods used to push rockets and spacecraft forward. To make interplanetary travel faster, safer and more efficient, scientists need breakthroughs in propulsion technology. Artificial intelligence (AI) is one type of technology that has begun to provide some of these necessary breakthroughs. We’re a team of engineers and graduate students who are studying how AI in general, and a subset of AI called machine learning in…

Three years ago, if someone needed to fix a leaky faucet or understand inflation, they usually did one of three things: typed the question into Google, searched YouTube for a how-to video or shouted desperately at Alexa for help. Today, millions of people start with a different approach: They open ChatGPT and just ask. I’m a professor and director of research impact and AI strategy at Mississippi State University Libraries. As a scholar who studies information retrieval, I see that this shift of the tool people reach for first for finding information is at the heart of how ChatGPT has changed…

In a wave of new ads, brands like Heineken, Polaroid and Cadbury have started hating on artificial intelligence (AI), celebrating their work as “human-made”. But in these advertising campaigns on TV, billboards on New York streets and on social media, the companies are signalling something larger. Even Apple’s new series release, Pluribus, includes the phrase “Made by Humans” in the closing credits. Other brands, including H&M and Guess, have faced backlash for using AI brand ambassadors instead of humans. These gestures suggest we have reached a cultural moment in the evolution of this technology, where people are unsure what creativity means when machines…

The line between human and machine authorship is blurring, particularly as it’s become increasingly difficult to tell whether something was written by a person or AI. Now, in what may seem like a tipping point, the digital marketing firm Graphite recently published a study showing that more than 50% of articles on the web are being generated by artificial intelligence. As a scholar who explores how AI is built, how people are using it in their everyday lives, and how it’s affecting culture, I’ve thought a lot about what this technology can do and where it falls short. If you’re more likely to read something…

Across the world, workers are increasingly anxious that artificial intelligence (AI) will make their jobs obsolete. But the evidence from research and industry tells a very different story. AI is not taking over the workplace. Instead, it’s quietly reshaping what human work looks like – and what makes people valuable within it. In my research on how the workforce is being transformed by AI, I found that the most successful organisations are not the ones replacing employees with algorithms, but those redesigning their workplaces to combine human and machine intelligence. AI excels at routine, repetitive and data-intensive tasks – scanning through thousands of…

Blue Origin’s New Glenn rocket successfully made its way to orbit for the second time on Nov. 13, 2025. Although the second launch is never as flashy as the first, this mission is still significant in several ways. For one, it launched a pair of NASA spacecraft named ESCAPADE, which are headed to Mars orbit to study that planet’s magnetic environment and atmosphere. The twin spacecraft will first travel to a Lagrange point, a place where the gravity between Earth, the Moon and the Sun balances. The ESCAPADE spacecraft will remain there until Mars is in better alignment to travel to. And two, importantly for Blue…

Since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, millions of people have started using large language models to access knowledge. And it’s easy to understand their appeal: Ask a question, get a polished synthesis and move on – it feels like effortless learning. However, a new paper I co-authored offers experimental evidence that this ease may come at a cost: When people rely on large language models to summarise information on a topic for them, they tend to develop shallower knowledge about it compared to learning through a standard Google search. Co-author Jin Ho Yun and I, both professors of marketing, reported this…

That trust in media is declining throughout the world is almost an unquestioned truth today. But researchers have found it hard to clearly demonstrate how we went from an era of high trust in 20th-century media to one of low trust in the digital age. The ways people engage with media and where they go for trusted information are changing. From 2011 to 2024, my colleagues and I at the Glasgow University Media Group have charted these trends through a series of focus group studies. Our findings, summarised in my book The Construction of Public Opinion in a Digital Age, suggest that many people…