Author: The Conversation

In February 2023, a little more than a year after the launch of ChatGPT, Vanderbilt University sent an email to its student body in the wake of a fatal campus shooting at Michigan State. “The recent Michigan shootings are a tragic reminder of the importance of taking care of each other,” the email read in part. In tiny type at the bottom of the message, a disclaimer appeared: “paraphrased from OpenAI’s ChatGPT.” Students immediately objected. “There is a sick and twisted irony to making a computer write your message about community and togetherness because you can’t be bothered to reflect on it…

Social media platforms Instagram and YouTube have a design defect, which means they are addictive, a jury in the United States has ruled. The Los Angeles jury took nearly nine days to reach its verdict in the landmark case brought by a woman known as KGM against social media platforms. It awarded US$3 million (A$4.3 million) in damages, with Meta (owner of Instagram) being 70% responsible and Google (owner of YouTube) 30%. The jury later awarded a further US$3 million in punitive damages. Both TikTok and Snap settled on confidential terms before the six-week trial commenced. This is Meta’s second big loss in the…

Suspicion and affection. Apprehension and excitement. Most people have mixed feelings about AI English, whether or not they always recognise it. When reading text generated by AI, people feel it sounds off, or fake. When reading English by a human, people are more likely to feel it has a characteristic voice or a personal touch. What exactly makes English sound human, or sound like AI? And does it matter if AI English never truly achieves a human feel? I research the institutionalisation of English. There is a long, problematic history of people feeling positively or negatively toward different kinds of English, rewarding how…

More than 10,000 Starlink satellites currently orbit the Earth. We see them crawling across dark skies, no matter how remote our location, and streaking through images from research telescopes. SpaceX recently announced that it wants to launch one million more of these satellites as orbital data centres for AI computing power. A few years ago, we wrote a paper predicting what the night sky would look like with 65,000 satellites from four planned megaconstellations: SpaceX’s Starlink, Amazon’s Kuiper (now Leo), the U.K.’s OneWeb and China’s Guowang. We calibrated our models to observations of real Starlink satellites and came up with a startling prediction: One in 15 visible points in the night sky would…

During the First World War, the British government was looking for ways to help people stretch their limited food supplies. It found pamphlets from a noted 19th-century herbalist who said rhubarb leaves could be used as a vegetable along with the stalks. The government duly printed its own pamphlets advising people to eat rhubarb leaves as a salad rather than throwing them out. There was one problem: rhubarb leaves can be poisonous. People reportedly died or became ill. The advice was corrected, and the pamphlets were pulled from circulation. But during the Second World War, the government was again looking for…

Since tools like ChatGPT burst into higher education, debate has focused on two extremes: either students are all committing underhanded academic fraud and plagiarism or artificial intelligence (AI) will magically revolutionise learning. The latest research project I co-authored with Anna Holland, and carried out among recent Management graduates in the United Kingdom, suggests something more complicated and surprisingly more human. Generative AI tools such as ChatGPT are increasingly used in business and management education for tasks like analysing cases, brainstorming ideas, and drafting reports, improving efficiency and personalised learning but also raising concerns about academic integrity and assessment design. AI literacy and ethical use…

Science in the modern era is increasingly reliant on enormous datasets and automated analysis. In astronomy, the Vera C. Rubin Observatory’s Legacy Survey of Space and Time (LSST) – a ten-year survey covering the entire southern sky almost a thousand times over the next decade – will test the limits of this reliance. The Rubin Observatory, located on a mountaintop called Cerro Pachón in Chile, is expected to catalogue the night sky in exquisite detail. The observatory aims to answer a number of questions about the universe by studying different phenomena in the sky, including supernovae (exploding stars), asteroids, dark matter and…

K-12 teachers and students across the country are increasingly using AI in and out of classrooms, whether it is teachers turning to AI to refine lesson plans or students asking AI to help them research a particular topic. An estimated 85% of K-12 public school teachers recently reported that they used AI during the 2024-2025 school year – often for curriculum and content development. In 2023, 13% of teens said they used ChatGPT to complete their schoolwork, while 26% of them said in 2025 that they were using ChatGPT for this purpose. Similarly, 86% of K-12 students shared in 2025 that they have used AI in general.…

I remember the first time I attended a linguistics lecture as an undergraduate in Argentina. The lecturer asked a simple question: Where does language come from? My instinctive answer was: books. After four decades of researching language and linguistics, that response now seems almost absurd. But it reflects a common bias among those of us raised in text-based cultures. We tend to view written language as the ultimate form of expression, knowledge transmission, and even thinking itself. Yet linguists know that speech comes first – historically, developmentally and cognitively. Writing is a relatively recent technological invention layered on top of something much…

It’s a familiar feeling: You start a text message, and your phone’s auto-complete function suggests several choices for the next word, ranging from banal to hilarious. “I love…” you, or coffee? Or you’re finishing an email, and merely typing the word “Let” prompts your app to suggest “Let me know if you have any questions” in light grey text. Predictive language technologies have become so routine – baked into smartphones, email services and chatbots – that we barely notice them anymore. But they raise a difficult question: What happens to a writer’s unique voice when AI routinely completes their thoughts – or…