Author: The Conversation

The rigid structures of language we once clung to with certainty are cracking. Take gender, nationality or religion: these concepts no longer sit comfortably in the stiff linguistic boxes of the last century. Simultaneously, the rise of AI presses upon us the need to understand how words relate to meaning and reasoning. A global group of philosophers, mathematicians and computer scientists have come up with a new understanding of logic that addresses these concerns, dubbed “inferentialism”. One standard intuition of logic, dating back at least to Aristotle , is that a logical consequence ought to hold by virtue of the content of the propositions…

Last week, three tiny Australian satellites from Curtin University’s Binar Space Program burned up in Earth’s atmosphere. That was always going to happen. In fact, Binar means “fireball” in the Noongar language of the First Nations people of Perth. When a satellite is in low Earth orbit (2,000km or less), it experiences orbital decay as it drags closer and closer to the surface, eventually burning up. But these cube satellites (CubeSats), known as Binar-2, 3 and 4, entered the atmosphere much sooner than originally planned. They only lasted for two months – a third of what was expected. This significantly reduced valuable time for…

Here are some lines Sylvia Plath never wrote: The air is thick with tension, My mind is a tangled mess, The weight of my emotions Is heavy on my chest. This apparently Plath-like verse was produced by GPT3.5 in response to the prompt “Write a short poem in the style of Sylvia Plath”. The stanza hits the key points readers may expect of Plath’s poetry, and perhaps a poem more generally. It suggests a sense of despair as the writer struggles with internal demons. “Mess” and “chest” are a near-rhyme, which reassures us that we are in the realm of…

Fraudulent payments – where people are tricked into sending money to criminals – cost consumers £460 million in England and Wales last year. To give consumers more protection, the UK government now plans to give banks 72 hours to delay the completion of potentially fraudulent transfers. The growth of the decentralised finance sector – including cryptocurrencies and the platforms that facilitate their trade – offers an alternative to mainstream finance. But as well as new opportunities, the growth of DeFi (as it’s known) has brought serious risks of financial crime and scams. On the one hand, the blockchain technology used in cryptocurrencies has been heralded…

The Australian government is developing legislation that will ban children under 16 from social media. There has been a huge public debate about whether there is sufficient direct evidence of harm to introduce this regulation. The players in this debate include academics, mental health organisations, advocacy groups and digital education providers. Few steps back to look at the entire research landscape. Social media has become integral to everyday life. Not many teens want to be extensively researched, so studies are pragmatic, require consent and findings are limited. As a result, we tend to hear that the effects are small or even inconclusive. For the public…

Think back to a time when you needed a quick answer, maybe for a recipe or a DIY project. A few years ago, most people’s first instinct was to “Google it.” Today, however, many people are more likely to reach for ChatGPT, OpenAI’s conversational AI, which is changing the way people look for information. Rather than simply providing lists of websites, ChatGPT gives more direct, conversational responses. But can ChatGPT do more than just answer straightforward questions? Can it actually help people be more creative? I study new technologies and consumer interaction with social media. My colleague Byung Lee and I set out to explore…

Meta will make its generative artificial intelligence (AI) models available to the United States’ government, the tech giant has announced, in a controversial move that raises a moral dilemma for everyone who uses the software. Meta last week revealed it would make the models, known as Llama, available to government agencies, “including those that are working on defence and national security applications, and private sector partners supporting their work”. The decision appears to contravene Meta’s own policy which lists a range of prohibited uses for Llama, including “[m]ilitary, warfare, nuclear industries or applications” as well as espionage, terrorism, human trafficking and exploitation or harm…

Anyone following the rhetoric around artificial intelligence (AI) in recent years has heard one version or another of the claim that AI is inevitable. Common themes are that AI is already here, it is indispensable, and people who are bearish on it harm themselves. In the business world, AI advocates tell companies and workers that they will fall behind if they fail to integrate generative AI into their operations. In the sciences, AI advocates promise that AI will aid in curing hitherto intractable diseases. In higher education, AI promoters admonish teachers that students must learn how to use AI or risk becoming uncompetitive when…

Globally, there’s a shortage of people with the expertise and skills needed to drive the transition towards a green economy – known as green talent. The pool of green talent needs to be doubled by 2050 if the world is to move away from fossil fuels. In South Africa, despite efforts, there are still gaps in green talent training. These are delaying the transition away from coal. Sean Kruger, a technology and innovation specialist at the University of Pretoria’s Centre for the Future of Work, unpacks what is needed to close the green talent gap. What is South Africa’s green talent gap? South Africa has substantial…

In the 2016 science fiction movie Arrival, a linguist is faced with the daunting task of deciphering an alien language consisting of palindromic phrases, which read the same backwards as they do forwards, written with circular symbols. As she discovers various clues, different nations around the world interpret the messages differently – with some assuming they convey a threat. If humanity ended up in such a situation today, our best bet may be to turn to research uncovering how artificial intelligence (AI) develops languages. But what exactly defines a language? Most of us use at least one to communicate with…