Author: The Conversation

In 1950, William Faulkner delivered a famous acceptance speech for the Nobel prize in literature in which he rallied for the “inexhaustible [human] voice” and his belief in its supremacy – not merely to endure but to prevail. Faulkner reasoned this was because the human voice, transmuted into art, possesses soul – a soul capable of compassion and sacrifice. Fast forward 75 years. Irish writer Colm Tóibín is asked about AI’s impact on writers in a newspaper interview. His wry response: “AI will be the end of us.” Tóibín seems to believe that the triumphant human voice, one which writers and artists often cling…

These days, Gen Z appears to be pivoting towards skilled trades, perhaps driven by a desire for “AI-proof” job security. Many young workers now view blue-collar careers as more stable than office jobs in the face of rapid change. It’s not just the youngest workers. A growing sense of unease about AI is reshaping how many people think about work. Within younger groups, this shift is showing up in hard numbers. In the UK, hiring of Gen Z workers (those born in or after 1997) in construction and trade roles rose by 16.8% in the year to January 2026. The result is what some are calling…

Across Africa, governments are introducing digital systems that use individuals’ unique physical measurements to identify them. These systems collect citizens’ biometric and personal data and use it to give people access to essential public services like voting, healthcare, education and social protection. Biometric digital identification systems are often promoted as tools to improve efficiency, inclusion and service delivery. But a new report by the African Digital Rights Network, published by the Institute of Development Studies, highlights serious concerns about exclusion, rights violations, data protection and accountability. Drawing on evidence from ten African countries, the report shows how millions of people are struggling…

Across the U.S., hundreds of sites on land or in lakes and rivers are heavily contaminated with hazardous waste produced by human activity. Many of these places, designated as Superfund sites by the Environmental Protection Agency, can be found in Houston, Texas, the city where my colleagues and I live and work. Hazardous contaminants present at these sites that can increase the risk of cancer – such as polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, or PAHs – are pervasive in soil and water. Detecting these contaminants is only the first step to cleaning them up and keeping the environment safe. The EPA’s standard methods for analysing water…

In graduate school, my experimental archaeology professor told a student to create a door socket – the hole in a door frame that a bolt slides into – in a slab of sandstone by pecking at it with a rounded stone. After a couple of weeks, the student presented his results to the class. “I pecked the sandstone about 10,000 times,” he said, “and then it broke.” This kind of experience is known as individual learning. It works through trial and error, with lots of each. Also known as reinforcement learning, it is how children, chimpanzees, crows and AI often learn to do something on…

Few actors are imitated as often as Michael Caine. Even Michael Caine has imitated Michael Caine. His voice has been used in birthday card greetings and has been the source of jokes in various comedy sketches. It is synonymous with a certain type of Britishness. Last week, artificial intelligence (AI) company ElevenLabs announced that Caine has licensed his voice to the company. It will be available on their ElevenReader app, which allows you to listen to any text in a voice of your choosing, as well as being available on their licensing platform, Iconic Marketplace. To understand why Caine’s voice is so iconic (and…

How did life begin on Earth? While scientists have theories, they don’t yet fully understand the precise chemical steps that led to biology, or when the first primitive life forms appeared. But what if Earth’s life did not originate here, instead arriving on meteorites from Mars? It’s not the most favoured theory for life’s origins, but it remains an intriguing hypothesis. Here, we’ll examine the evidence for and against. Timing is a key factor. Mars formed around 4.6 billion years ago, while Earth is slightly younger at 4.54 billion years old. The surfaces of both planets were initially molten, before…

Artificial intelligence (AI) is at a very Chinese time in its life. Recent moves from Chinese AI labs are throwing the dominance of American “frontier labs” such as Google and OpenAI into question. Last week ByteDance, the company behind TikTok, released an AI video-generating tool called Seedance 2.0 which produces high-quality film-like clips from text prompts, with a casual disregard for copyright concerns. This week Anthropic, the US company behind the chatbot Claude, said three Chinese AI labs created thousands of fake accounts to harvest Claude’s answers in a practice called “distillation” which can be used to improve AI models. These events have led…

When a human says an event is “probable” or “likely,” people generally have a shared, if fuzzy, understanding of what that means. But when an AI chatbot like ChatGPT uses the same word, it’s not assessing the odds the way we do, my colleagues and I found. We recently published a study in the journal NPJ Complexity that suggests that, while large language model AIs excel at conversation, they often fail to align with humans when communicating uncertainty. The research focused on words of estimative probability, which include terms like “maybe,” “probably” and “almost certain.” By comparing how AI models and humans map…

It’s 1 a.m. The argument is over, but you keep running it back in your head anyway. You replay the tone, timing and that one sentence that landed wrong. So you open an artificial intelligence (AI) chatbot and type, “Am I right or am I overreacting? What do I say to what they said? What did they mean by XYZ?” Research on attachment, emotion regulation and online discourse helps explain why turning to AI is becoming increasingly popular. The reassurance that it provides, however, can consolidate a one-sided interpretation far too quickly and, ultimately, train expectations that real relationships struggle to meet.…