Author: The Conversation

You’ve probably noticed lately that a lot of people are trying out alternatives to the big social media networks X, Instagram and Facebook. For example, after Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022 and started allowing far more disinformation and hateful content on the site, renamed X, advertisers and users started backing away. More recently, Meta’s decision to roll back hate speech rules has prompted many people to consider leaving Instagram and Facebook. Some of the most popular new destinations include “federated” services like Mastodon and Pixelfed, as well as the quasi-federated Bluesky. Federated means decentralized – rather than one central service, like X, federated systems have tens of thousands of servers. They also…

People say they prefer a short story written by a human over one composed by artificial intelligence (AI), yet most still invest the same amount of time and money reading both stories regardless of whether it is labeled as AI-generated. That was the main finding of a study we conducted recently to test whether this preference of humans over AI in creative works actually translates into consumer behavior. Amid the coming avalanche of AI-generated work, it is a question of real livelihoods for the millions of people worldwide employed in creative industries. To investigate, we asked OpenAI’s ChatGPT 4 to generate a short…

Software is ubiquitous, powering almost every aspect of our lives. The computerised systems in your car alone incorporate tens of millions of lines of code. The increasing digital transformation of our society means that demand for more and better software is likely to continue into the future. The dilemma is that there are not enough human programmers to build all this software. This means that more and more of the software you use every day is built with the assistance of artificial intelligence (AI). Software developers are already very familiar with tools such as GitHub Copilot, a kind of ChatGPT for programmers. It works…

In the digital economy, data is more than just information – it is an asset with immense economic and strategic value. Yet, despite its significance, a fundamental legal question remains unresolved: Can data be owned? While privacy laws worldwide focus on protecting individuals’ rights over their personal data, they often sidestep the issue of ownership. This has led to legal uncertainty, particularly in South Africa, where the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) grants data subjects various rights over their personal information but does not explicitly address ownership. This gap in legal clarity raises pressing questions: If personal data – such…

Earlier this week, Saturn gained a whopping 128 new official moons, as the International Astronomical Union recognised discoveries from a team of astronomers led by Edward Ashton at the Academia Sinica in Taiwan. The sixth planet from the Sun now has a grand total of 274 moons, the most of any planet in the Solar System. The discovery has raised a lot of questions. How do you spot moons, and why hadn’t anybody seen these ones already? Doesn’t Jupiter have the most moons? What are they going to call all these moons? Are there more out there? And what exactly makes something a…

In November 2023, the estates of two now-deceased policyholders sued the US health insurer, United Healthcare, for deploying what they allege is a flawed artificial intelligence (AI) system to systematically deny patient claims. The issue – they claim – wasn’t just how the AI was designed. It was that the company allegedly also limited the ability of staff to override the system’s decisions, even if they thought the system was wrong. They allege the company even went so far as to punish staff who failed to act in accordance with the model’s predictions. Regardless of the eventual outcome of this case, which…

When you visit a hospital, artificial intelligence (AI) models can assist doctors by analysing medical images or predicting patient outcomes based on historical data. If you apply for a job, AI algorithms can be used to screen resumés, rank job candidates and even conduct initial interviews. When you want to watch a movie on Netflix, a recommendation algorithm predicts which movies you’re likely to enjoy based on your viewing habits. Even when you are driving, predictive algorithms are at work in navigation apps like Waze and Google Maps, optimising routes and predicting traffic patterns to ensure faster travel. In the workplace, AI-powered…

In the past three years, astronomers have discovered a mysterious new type of radio source. We call these long period transients. These objects emit bright radio signals that repeat every few minutes to every few hours. We have found about a dozen examples, but we still don’t understand which type of star could emit radio pulses in this peculiar way. In new research published in Nature Astronomy today, we have discovered a new long period transient. Furthermore, we identified the stars responsible for the mysterious radio flashes – a breakthrough never achieved before. Spoiler alert: they’re not the typical “cosmic lighthouses” you…

The potential of using artificial intelligence in drug discovery and development has sparked both excitement and skepticism among scientists, investors and the general public. “Artificial intelligence (AI) is taking over drug development,” claim some companies and researchers. Over the past few years, interest in using AI to design drugs and optimize clinical trials has driven a surge in research and investment. AI-driven platforms like AlphaFold, which won the 2024 Nobel Prize for its ability to predict the structure of proteins and design new ones, showcase AI’s potential to accelerate drug development. AI in drug discovery is “nonsense,” warn some industry veterans. They urge that “AI’s potential to…

The computer scientists Rich Sutton and Andrew Barto have been recognised for a long track record of influential ideas with this year’s Turing Award, the most prestigious in the field. Sutton’s 2019 essay The Bitter Lesson, for instance, underpins much of today’s feverishness around artificial intelligence (AI). He argues that methods to improve AI that rely on heavy-duty computation rather than human knowledge are “ultimately the most effective, and by a large margin”. This is an idea whose truth has been demonstrated many times in AI history. Yet there’s another important lesson in that history from some 20 years ago that we…