Author: The Conversation

Imagine a student using a writing assistant powered by a generative AI chatbot. As the bot serves up practical suggestions and encouragement, insights come more easily, drafts polish up quickly and feedback loops feel immediate. It can be energising. But when that AI support is removed, some students report feeling less confident or less willing to engage. These outcomes raise the question: Can AI tools genuinely boost student motivation? And what conditions can make or break that boost? As AI tools become more common in classroom settings, the answers to these questions matter a lot. While tools for general use…

In recent years, several websites selling ultra-low-cost goods have appeared on the French market. Shein, Temu and AliExpress, to name but a few, are shaking up the online retail landscape. According to a study conducted by BPCE Digital & Payments, the number of payment cards recording at least one monthly transaction on a discount site increased by 20% between the first quarters of 2022 and 2023. This is hardly surprising given that Temu’s website has millions of French visitors every month, according to data from the Federation of E-commerce and Distance-Selling (FEVAD). In mid-July 2025, low-cost platforms accounted for 22% of parcels handled by the…

Your phone buzzes at 6 a.m. It’s ChatGPT: “I see you’re travelling to New York this week. Based on your preferences, I’ve found three restaurants near your hotel. Would you like me to make a reservation?” You didn’t ask for this. The AI simply knew your plans from scanning your calendar and email and decided to help. Later, you mention to the chatbot needing flowers for your wife’s birthday. Within seconds, beautiful arrangements appear in the chat. You tap one: “Buy now.” Done. The flowers are ordered. This isn’t science fiction. On Sept. 29, 2025, OpenAI and payment processor Stripe launched the Agentic…

Poisoning is a term most often associated with the human body and natural environments. But it is also a growing problem in the world of artificial intelligence (AI) – in particular, for large language models such as ChatGPT and Claude. In fact, a joint study by the UK AI Security Institute, Alan Turing Institute and Anthropic, published earlier this month, found that inserting as few as 250 malicious files into the millions in a model’s training data can secretly “poison” it. So what exactly is AI poisoning? And what risks does it pose? What is AI poisoning? Generally speaking, AI poisoning refers to the process…

When someone opens the door and enters a hospital room, wearing a stethoscope is a telltale sign that they’re a clinician. This medical device has been around for over 200 years and remains a staple in the clinic despite significant advances in medical diagnostics and technologies. The stethoscope is a medical instrument used to listen to and amplify the internal sounds produced by the body. Physicians still use the sounds they hear through stethoscopes as initial indicators of heart or lung diseases. For example, a heart murmur or crackling lungs often signify that an issue is present. Although there have been significant…

The hope of the world wide web, according to its creator Tim Berners-Lee, was that it would make communication easier, bring knowledge to all, and strengthen democracy and connection. Instead, it seems to be driving us apart into increasingly small and angry splinter groups. Why? We have commonly blamed online echo chambers, digital spaces filled with people who largely share the same beliefs – or filter bubbles, the idea that algorithms tend to show us content we are likely to agree with. However, these concepts have both been challenged by a number of studies. A 2022 study led by one of us (Dana), which…

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Siri or Google Assistant are developed by the global north and trained in English, Chinese or European languages. In comparison, African languages are largely missing from the internet. A team of African computer scientists, linguists, language specialists and others have been working on precisely this problem for two years already. The African Next Voices project, primarily funded by the Gates Foundation (with other funding from Meta) and involving a network of African universities and organisations, recently released what’s thought to be the largest dataset of African languages for AI so far. We asked them about…

There’s no doubt that artificial intelligence (AI) will have a profound impact on our economies, work and lifestyle. But could this technology also shape the way we think and speak? AI can be used to draft essays and solve problems in mere seconds that otherwise might take us minutes or hours. When we shift to an over-reliance on such tools, we arguably fail to exercise key skills such as critical thinking and our ability to use language creatively. Precedents from psychology and neuroscience research hint that we should take the possibility seriously. There are several precedents for technology reconfiguring our minds,…

How do computers see the world? It’s not quite the same way humans do. Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) make it possible to do more things with computer image processing. You might ask an AI tool to describe an image, for example, or to create an image from a description you provide. As generative AI tools and services become more embedded in day-to-day life, knowing more about how computer vision compares to human vision is becoming essential. My latest research, published in Visual Communication, uses AI-generated descriptions and images to get a sense of how AI models “see” –…

Earlier this year, a band called The Velvet Sundown racked up hundreds of thousands of streams on Spotify with retro-pop tracks, generating a million monthly listeners on Spotify. But the band wasn’t real. Every song, image, and even its backstory, had been generated by someone using generative AI. For some, it was a clever experiment. For others, it revealed a troubling lack of transparency in music creation, even though the band’s Spotify descriptor was later updated to acknowledge it is composed with AI. In September 2025, Spotify announced it is “helping develop and will support the new industry standard for AI disclosures in music credits developed through…