Author: The Conversation

The computer scientists Rich Sutton and Andrew Barto have been recognised for a long track record of influential ideas with this year’s Turing Award, the most prestigious in the field. Sutton’s 2019 essay The Bitter Lesson, for instance, underpins much of today’s feverishness around artificial intelligence (AI). He argues that methods to improve AI that rely on heavy-duty computation rather than human knowledge are “ultimately the most effective, and by a large margin”. This is an idea whose truth has been demonstrated many times in AI history. Yet there’s another important lesson in that history from some 20 years ago that we…

Earlier this year I received comments on an academic manuscript of mine as part of the usual peer review process, and noticed something strange. My research focuses on ensuring trustworthy evidence is used to inform policy, practice and decision making. I often collaborate with groups like the World Health Organization to conduct systematic reviews to inform clinical and public health guidelines or policy. The paper I had submitted for peer review was about systematic review conduct. What I noticed raised my concerns about the growing role artificial intelligence (AI) is playing in the scientific process. A service to the community…

Sometimes AI isn’t as clever as we think it is. Researchers training an algorithm to identify skin cancer thought they had succeeded until they discovered that it was using the presence of a ruler to help it make predictions. Specifically, their data set consisted of images where a pathologist had put in a ruler to measure the size of malignant lesions. It extended this logic for predicting malignancies to all images beyond the data set, consequently identifying benign tissue as malignant if a ruler was in the image. The problem here is not that the AI algorithm made a mistake. Rather, the…

For a few days in mid-February, headlines around the world buzzed about the potential for an asteroid to hit the Earth in 2032 — specifically, asteroid 2024 YR4. The chance of this impact rose to a high of 3.1 per cent on Feb. 18. The number has since dropped to near zero, but this news was a real-life Don’t Look Up moment, and a stark reminder of the threat that asteroid impacts pose to life on Earth. As a planetary geologist, my research focuses on meteorite impact craters, the scars of large asteroid and cometary impacts in Earth’s past. Impact Earth There are countless numbers of asteroids…

The Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance, the union for voice actors and creatives, recently circulated a video of voice actor Thomas G. Burt describing the impact of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) on his livelihood. Voice actors have been hit hard by GenAI, particularly those working in the video game sector. Many are contract workers without ongoing employment, and for some game companies already feeling the squeeze, supplementing voice-acting work with GenAI is just too tempting. View this post on Instagram A post shared by MEAA (@withmeaa) Audio work – whether music, sound design or voice acting – already lacks strong protections. Recent research from…

What if we told you that artificial intelligence (AI) systems such as ChatGPT don’t actually learn? Many people we talk to are genuinely surprised to hear this. Even AI systems themselves will often tell you confidently that they are learning systems. Many reports and even academic papers say the same. But this is due to a misconception – or rather a loose understanding of what we mean by “learning” in AI. Yet, understanding more precisely how and when AI systems learn (and when they don’t) will make you a more productive and more responsible user of AI. AI does not learn – at least…

The typical adult in the UK spends nearly two hours on social media per day. And for younger users, this can easily be up to five hours. The likes of Instagram or TikTok seem to draw us into their ever-changing feeds, and it’s difficult to tear ourselves away from these platforms. Now our latest study shows that even our body reflects a state of being glued to the screen when we are on social media. We asked 54 young adults to browse their Instagram on their phone for 15 minutes as they would normally do in their daily life. However, in our study we had…

Radio astronomers see what the naked eye can’t. As we study the sky with telescopes that record radio signals rather than light, we end up seeing a lot of circles. The newest generation of radio telescopes – including the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) and MeerKAT, a telescope in South Africa – is revealing incredibly faint cosmic objects, never before seen. In astronomy, surface brightness is a measure that tells us how easily visible an object is. The extraordinary sensitivity of MeerKAT and ASKAP is now revealing a new “low surface brightness universe” to radio astronomers. It’s comprised of radio sources so…

The practice of medicine has undergone an incredible, albeit incomplete, transformation over the past 50 years, moving steadily from a field informed primarily by expert opinion and the anecdotal experience of individual clinicians toward a formal scientific discipline. The advent of evidence-based medicine meant clinicians identified the most effective treatment options for their patients based on quality evaluations of the latest research. Now, precision medicine is enabling providers to use a patient’s individual genetic, environmental and clinical information to further personalize their care. The potential benefits of precision medicine also come with new challenges. Importantly, the amount and complexity of data available for each patient…

After a year of shoehorning generative AI into its flagship products, Microsoft is trying to recoup the costs by raising prices, putting ads in products, and cancelling data centre leases. Google is making similar moves, adding unavoidable AI features to its Workspace service while increasing prices. Is the tide finally turning on investments into generative AI? The situation is not quite so simple. Tech companies are fully committed to the new technology – but are struggling to find ways to make people pay for it. Shifting costs Last week, Microsoft unceremoniously pulled back on some planned data centre leases. The move came after the…