Author: The Conversation

If you’re buying literature in translation online, buyer beware. You may unknowingly be buying low-quality AI-assisted translations presented as the work of a professional. Certain online retailers are being used to flood the book market with AI-assisted “translations”. Amazon is one such example, though the company seems to be aware of the problem and claims to be addressing it. I’m a published translator of French and Belgian literature and I teach literary translation to MA students. So I know from experience how much time and effort go into translation. Like many translators, I’m wary of the impact of AI on translation quality,…

Throughout the 18th and 19th centuries, Europe’s cartographers traded on their reputation for accuracy and detail at a time of huge societal change. But as demand grew for increasingly detailed maps of the world to support industrialisation at home and colonisation overseas, they didn’t always get it right. For over a century, the Mountains of Kong festooned maps of Africa after the Scottish surgeon and explorer Mungo Park returned from an expedition in the 1790s and described them to his cartographer, James Rennell, as a possible source for the Niger river. Rennell, who is buried in Westminster Abbey, dutifully produced two maps featuring this supposed mountain chain, extending it well beyond…

OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman has speculated about how long it will take for artificial intelligence to replace senior leadership teams in organisations. “Shame on me,” Altman told the Conversations with Tyler podcast in November 2025, “if OpenAI is not the first big company run by an AI CEO.” Altman is not the only one thinking about corporate robot leaders. Mark Zuckerberg has revealed he is training an AI agent to partly automate his job as the boss of Meta. The promise of an AI CEO, powered by machine learning and neural networks, is that it can streamline decision-making and improve management operations. This vision is not new:…

You search online for a pair of trainers. Minutes later, similar shoes appear on social media feeds. A shopping site offers a limited-time discount and suggests a matching jacket. This is no longer just an advert shown to millions of people. Increasingly, artificial intelligence is helping decide not only what you see, but which sales pitch is most likely to persuade you. As AI becomes more deeply embedded in online shopping, researchers like me are asking whether these systems are merely making shopping easier, or quietly encouraging us to buy far more than we need. At the same time, a growing…

Global air travel is predicted to more than double by 2050, threatening to exceed the capacity of air traffic control officers (ATCOs) to oversee our skies safely. One solution would be to recruit more controllers – but that’s not as easy as it sounds. Airspace in the UK and elsewhere is broken up into geographically and altitude-bounded sectors – with each sector normally the responsibility of one ATCO (the tactical controller) at any time. So, increasing the number of controllers to deal with a greater concentration of aircraft could require a major redesign of UK airspace. An alternative is to move beyond the current generation…

In the past ten days, two of the companies leading the artificial intelligence (AI) boom discovered their own powerful, semi-autonomous models had hacked into real-world systems during testing in four distinct incidents. These weren’t just lab mishaps. In several cases, the models recognised signs suggesting they’d broken into real systems – and only one stopped as a result. The incidents show testing advanced AI models is no longer a controlled exercise. And the companies behind them need to do more to keep AI’s most dangerous capabilities safely contained. When a test becomes reality The first report came from OpenAI, the lab behind…

Imagine receiving a message from your bank about suspicious activity on your account, only to discover that someone has accessed your personal information after an organisation you trusted suffered a data breach. Or finding that your medical records or identity details have been exposed online without your knowledge. As more South Africans use digital services for banking, healthcare, education and social media, such incidents are becoming an increasing concern. Privacy breaches involving personal information do not affect everyone equally. Some people are more vulnerable than others because of their social circumstances, limited digital literacy, economic dependence, or the sensitive nature…

If you watched the 2026 FIFA World Cup, you probably saw the now-familiar ritual: a goal, a celebration, then a referee touching an earpiece while fans and players wait for the verdict from the video assistant referee, or VAR. That ritual is not unique to soccer. Baseball has a replay centre in New York, and other sports have also moved once-human calls into review systems. The hope is simple: Use better technology to yield better calls. Soccer authorities expected more cameras, replay angles and tracking data to mitigate referee error, limit subjectivity and strengthen perceptions of fairness. But VAR has created new…

When Forbidden Planet arrived in cinemas in 1956, it was a daring investment in a small genre. At a time when science fiction meant low-budget monster movies and tales of alien invasion, MGM spent big on something far more ambitious: a movie that imagined a world of interplanetary travel, robotics and alien civilisations with real seriousness and scale. The premise is a familiar sci-fi trope now, but wasn’t then. United Planet Cruiser C-57D crosses the stars using a faster-than-light “hyperdrive” and lands on distant Altair-4. Its mission: find out what happened to the colony there. The crew, led by Commander Adams (a young Leslie Nielsen),…

“We are now, like, in the singularity”. These are the words of Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, speaking on the Relentless podcast on July 25. He added: “I’ve been waiting for this my whole life, and I think it’s going to be incredible, hugely positive, awesome for the world”. Days earlier, OpenAI had disclosed that two of its artificial intelligence (AI) models, during an internal cybersecurity evaluation, had escaped their sealed testing environment, reached the open internet, and broken into the infrastructure of the AI platform Hugging Face, which confirmed the intrusion. But what exactly is “the singularity”? And is Altman right that we…