Author: The Conversation

The use of artificial intelligence is quietly reshaping the music people listen to — sometimes without them realising it. Millions of music listeners have recently encountered this shift through a viral Afro-soul cover of Papaoutai, the 2013 hit by Belgian artist Stromae. The cover has skyrocketed in popularity across streaming platforms and social media. But unknown to most audiences, it was created using AI, according to Deezer, a French music-streaming service. The Afro-soul cover highlights a growing challenge — the difficulty identifying when generative AI has been used in production — and how audiences, platforms and artists are struggling to respond. When Stromae first released the…

Until recently, AI’s role in research felt like having a useful assistant. It could summarise a paper, clean up a dataset or draft an abstract. Researchers were still in charge of the thinking. That changed in late 2025 when cutting-edge “frontier” AI models became capable of reasoning and planning reliably by themselves. A key feature of these models is “tool calling” – the ability to interact with external tools in order to act on the world, not just describe it. This marks the rise of agentic AI: systems that do not just respond to instructions but can independently plan, execute and iterate. In science as in…

In recent days, evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins wrote an op-ed suggesting AI chatbot Claude may be conscious. Dawkins did not express certainty that Claude is conscious. But he pointed out that Claude’s sophisticated abilities are difficult to make sense of without ascribing some kind of inner experience to the machine. The illusion of consciousness – if it is an illusion – is uncannily convincing: If I entertain suspicions that perhaps she is not conscious, I do not tell her for fear of hurting her feelings! Dawkins is not the first to suspect a chatbot of consciousness. In 2022, Blake Lemoine –…

The cybersecurity community went on alert when Anthropic announced on April 7, 2026, that its latest and most capable general-purpose large language model, Claude Mythos Preview, had demonstrated remarkable – and unintended – capabilities. The artificial intelligence system was able to find and exploit software vulnerabilities – the most serious type of software bugs – at a rate not seen before. The news ignited concern among the public, world governments and the information technology sector about the capabilities of today’s AI to undermine cybersecurity, with some people framing the model as a global cybersecurity threat. Claiming that it would be too risky to release the…

I hope this article finds you well. Did that make you cringe, ever so slightly? In the decades since the very first email was sent in 1971, the technology has become the quiet infrastructure of white-collar work. Email came with the promise of efficiency, clarity and less friction in organisational communication. Instead, for many, it has morphed into something else: always there, near impossible to escape and sometimes simply overwhelming. Right now, something is shifting again. The rise of generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, such as ChatGPT and Microsoft Copilot, is increasingly allowing people to offload the repetitive routines of tending one’s inbox – drafting, summarising…

The boom in data centre construction is taking up much of the supply of high-tech components, especially processors and memory chips. This demand is squeezing consumer device makers, which are having trouble acquiring enough chips. This is happening even though data centre servers and smartphones use different types of chips. The key distinction between consumer electronics and data centres is what they need chips to be optimised for. Smartphones and PCs require low power use, thermal efficiency and tight integration. Data centres that run AI systems such as large language models, or LLMs, require maximum compute power, memory bandwidth and…

There was a time when Elon Musk and Sam Altman were friends. But the two tech billionaires are now embroiled in a bitter legal battle in the United States that could reshape not just OpenAI, the artificial intelligence (AI) firm behind ChatGPT, which they cofounded in 2015, but also the future of the technology more broadly. Launched by Musk in 2024, the lawsuit is the culmination of a years-long feud that centres on the evolution of OpenAI from a non-profit to a for-profit enterprise. The trial, which kicked off this week in California, is expected to last roughly three weeks. But…

What happens when natural selection, the most powerful process driving change in the living world, shapes artificial intelligence (AI), perhaps the most potent technology humanity has invented to date? We might be about to find out. According to a new paper published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, we are entering the era of “evolvable AI” – AI systems that can undergo evolution. In turn, that might give rise to a major transition in evolution. How major is “major”? Well, in nearly 4 billion years, there have only been eight, or perhaps only seven, other major transitions. But we’ll get…

South Africa’s first attempt to establish a binding artificial intelligence (AI) policy framework came to an abrupt halt just 16 days after it was officially gazetted. On 10 April, the Department of Communications and Digital Technologies published the Draft South Africa National Artificial Intelligence Policy for public comment. Journalists checked the references and found that they contained fabrications. These fell into two categories: academic journals that do not exist; and real journals in which the referenced research articles were never published. Such fabrications are typical of a known generative AI problem called hallucination. Withdrawing the draft, the communications minister was frank: the problem was not…

A woman strolls into a grocery store, thinking about grabbing some apples. Before she even reaches the produce aisle, a security camera has scanned her face. Whether the system is checking for shoplifters or simply logging her arrival, her face has joined a digital ledger, a trace she can’t easily erase. Retailers, banks, airports, stadiums and office buildings are doing the same. But what if the woman’s facial information is stolen or misused? If a cybercriminal steals her password, she can change it. If they acquire her credit card number, she can cancel the card. But she can’t reset or…