Author: The Conversation

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…

It’s becoming increasingly difficult to make today’s artificial intelligence (AI) systems work at the scale required to keep advancing. They require enormous amounts of memory to ensure all their processing chips can quickly share all the data they generate in order to work as a unit. The chips that have mostly been powering the deep-learning boom for the past decade are called graphics processing units (GPUs). They were originally designed for gaming, not for AI models, where each step in their thinking process must take place in well under a millisecond. Each chip contains only a modest amount of memory,…

The world’s most valuable publicly listed company, US microchip maker Nvidia, has reported record $US57 billion revenue in the third quarter of 2025, beating Wall Street estimates. The chipmaker said revenue will rise again to $US65 billion in the last part of the year. The better-than-expected results calmed global investors’ jitters following a tumultuous week for Nvidia and broader worries about the artificial intelligence (AI) bubble bursting. Just weeks ago, Nvidia became the first company valued at more than $US5 trillion – surpassing others in the “magnificent seven” tech companies: Alphabet (owner of Google), Amazon, Apple, Tesla, Meta (owner of Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp) and Microsoft.…

The global investment frenzy around AI has seen companies valued at trillions of dollars and eye-watering projections of how it will boost economic productivity. But in recent weeks, the mood has begun to shift. Investors and CEOs are now openly questioning whether the enormous costs of building and running AI systems can really be justified by future revenues. Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai, has spoken of “irrationality” in AI’s growth, while others have said some projects are proving to be more complex and expensive than expected. Meanwhile, global stock markets have declined, with tech shares taking a particular hit, and the value of cryptocurrencies has…