Author: The Conversation

Smartphone cameras have significantly improved in recent years. Computational photography and AI allow these devices to capture stunning images that can surpass what we see with the naked eye. Photos of the northern lights, or aurora borealis, provide one particularly striking example. If you saw the northern lights during the geomagnetic storms in May 2024, you might have noticed that your smartphone made the photos look even more vivid than reality. Auroras, known as the northern lights (aurora borealis) or southern lights (aurora australis) occur when the solar wind disturbs Earth’s magnetic field. They appear as streaks of colour across the sky. What makes…

Machine learning has pushed the boundaries in several fields, including personalized medicine, self-driving cars and customized advertisements. Research has shown, however, that these systems memorize aspects of the data they were trained with in order to learn patterns, which raises concerns for privacy. In statistics and machine learning, the goal is to learn from past data to make new predictions or inferences about future data. In order to achieve this goal, the statistician or machine learning expert selects a model to capture the suspected patterns in the data. A model applies a simplifying structure to the data, which makes it possible to learn patterns and make…

There are three ways to look for evidence of alien technological civilisations. One is to look out for deliberate attempts by them to communicate their existence, for example, through radio broadcasts. Another is to look for evidence of them visiting the Solar System. A third option is to look for signs of large-scale engineering projects in space. A team of astronomers have taken the third approach by searching through recent astronomical survey data to identify seven candidates for alien megastructures, known as Dyson spheres, “deserving of further analysis”. This is a detailed study looking for “oddballs” among stars – objects that might be…

Content created with the help of generative AI is popping up everywhere, and it’s worrying some artists and content creators. They’re concerned that their intellectual property may be at risk if generative AI tools have been built by scraping the internet for data and images, regardless of whether they had permission to do so. Now some artists and content creators are trying novel ways to sabotage AI to prevent it from scraping their work, through what’s called data poisoning. In this episode of The Conversation Weekly podcast, we speak with a computer scientist who explains how data poisoning works and what impact…

A parent asked a question in a private Facebook group in April 2024: Does anyone with a child who is both gifted and disabled have any experience with New York City public schools? The parent received a seemingly helpful answer that laid out some characteristics of a specific school, beginning with the context that “I have a child who is also 2e,” meaning twice exceptional. On a Facebook group for swapping unwanted items near Boston, a user looking for specific items received an offer of a “gently used” Canon camera and an “almost-new portable air conditioning unit that I never…

If you search “shrimp Jesus” on Facebook, you might encounter dozens of images of artificial intelligence (AI) generated crustaceans meshed in various forms with a stereotypical image of Jesus Christ. Some of these hyper-realistic images have garnered more than 20,000 likes and comments. So what exactly is going on here? The “dead internet theory” has an explanation: AI and bot-generated content has surpassed the human-generated internet. But where did this idea come from, and does it have any basis in reality? What is the dead internet theory? The dead internet theory essentially claims that activity and content on the internet,…

AlphaFold 3, unveiled to the world on May 9, is the latest version of an algorithm designed to predict the structures of proteins – vital molecules used by all life – from the “instruction code” in their building blocks. Predicting protein structures and the way they interact with other molecules has been one of the biggest problems in biology. Yet, AI developer Google DeepMind has gone some way to solving it in the last few years. This new version of the AI system features improved function and accuracy over its predecessors. Like the next release in a video game franchise, structural biologists – and most recently…

OpenAI’s new generative Sora tool has sparked lively technology discussions over the past week, generating both enthusiasm and concern among fans and critics. Sora is a text-to-video model that significantly advances the integration of deep learning, natural language processing and computer vision to transform textual prompts into detailed and coherent life-like video content. In contrast to previous text-to-video technologies, like Meta’s Make-A-Video, Sora is able to overcome limitations related to the type of visual data it can interpret, video length and resolution. From what OpenAI has demonstrated, Sora can generate videos of various lengths, from short clips to full-minute narratives, and in high definition, accommodating a wide range of creative…

We might soon see AI step up to the next level, with impending upgrades to artificial intelligence (AI) systems developed by OpenAI and Meta. OpenAI’s GPT-5 will be the new “engine” within the AI chatbot ChatGPT, while Meta’s upgrade will be named Llama 3. Among other things, the current version of Llama powers chatbots on Meta’s social media platforms. Statements to the media by executives at both OpenAI and Meta suggest that some ability to plan ahead will be incorporated into these upgraded systems. But how exactly will this innovation change the capabilities of AI chatbots? Imagine you are driving from home to work and want to select…

OpenAI’s new “strategic partnership” and licensing agreement with the Financial Times (FT) follows similar deals between the US tech company and publishers such as Associated Press, German media giant Axel Springer and French newspaper Le Monde. OpenAI will licence the FT’s content to use as training data for its products, including successors to its AI chatbot ChatGPT. The AI systems developed by OpenAI are exposed to this data to help them improve their performance in terms of use of language, context and accuracy. The FT will receive an undisclosed payment as part of the deal. This is happening against a global backdrop of legal…