Author: The Conversation

Concerns about students cheating with AI are rife within schools and universities. Some lecturers have even expressed fears that students have been “lobotomised by AI” amid reports that AI-detection tools are patchy and far from foolproof. Last week, New South Wales moved to ban take-home assignments for Year 12 to try to stop AI use in assessments. At the same time, a major generative AI system has developed a way to “watermark” whether or not a text is AI. Developer Anthropic has announced that the text output of Claude (one of the five big AI tools) will include a hidden label or watermark indicating the…

Do your social media accounts feed you content that reflects your core beliefs and guiding principles? Our new research published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences shows that the algorithms supplying your feeds may be prioritising content that clashes with your values. That’s because the algorithms heavily weigh online posts that you reply to, and social media users tend to more often comment on content they take issue with than content they agree with. Notably, our study of the X social media platform shows that although the X feed algorithm promotes content to both Democratic and Republican users that…

Water is an amazing substance. The human body is made up of more than 50% water. Approximately 70% of the Earth’s surface is covered by water. We drink it, bathe in it, cook with it, and clean with it. It is also used to cool data centres, which is an increasing draw on what is a scarce resource in many parts of the world. The boom in artificial intelligence (AI) has been fuelling the construction of new data centres worldwide. This is driven by the massive computing workloads required to train and run generative AI models. AI data centres are specialised facilities…

Imagine your team has been tasked with delivering a high-stakes policy paper under intense time pressure. Everyone turns to generative artificial intelligence (AI), and within minutes, it delivers a full draft complete with structured arguments and authoritative-looking citations. The team then transfers the AI-generated text into the corporate template, polishes the narrative flow and structure, and gives it one final check before sending it up the chain. Leadership takes a glimpse of the polished-looking draft, and – assuming the underlying research has already been verified – signs off and publishes. This scenario is not hypothetical. South Africa’s Draft National AI…

The recent announcement of novel, viable viruses created by artificial intelligence (AI) was celebrated as a major advance in the fight against antibiotic resistance. But it also raised urgent concerns about regulation. Alongside precision gene-editing technologies such as CRISPR/Cas9 and synthetic biology, AI is now making it increasingly possible to design and alter entire biological systems. These technologies could clearly do a lot of good. The new AI-designed viruses – bacteriophages that exclusively kill bacteria – rapidly overcame antibiotic-resistant strains of E. coli. Gene-editing itself is already contributing to medical advances such as the recently approved CRISPR-based therapy for sickle cell disease. And synthetic biology is helping to tackle environmental challenges by…

Human beings have long told versions of the same warning: be careful what you wish for. In Greek mythology, King Midas got exactly what he asked for, but at the cost of everything else he valued. In the famous story of The Monkey’s Paw, a man’s wishes are granted through terrible and unforeseen routes. These stories feel newly relevant with the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) agents: systems to which we can give a goal, then leave it to work out how to get there. As AI systems become more autonomous, they are coming to resemble wish-granting genies: finding routes and using methods…

NASA is planning to send three small rovers to the Moon with a single instruction: Work out among yourselves how to explore a patch of ground. The Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration mission, or CADRE, will land on the side of the Moon facing Earth as part of NASA’s IM-3 launch, planned for late 2026. These rovers will spend roughly two weeks mapping the terrain as a self-guided team. No joystick will control them, and no human will approve each turn. The rovers will elect a leader among themselves, assign their own tasks and redraw their plans as a group when one of…

For centuries, useful metals have been developed by starting with one core element and adding small amounts of other elements. Steel, for example, is composed primarily of iron; carbon is added in varied amounts to produce different grades of steel. Bronze is made up of copper and tin. These mixtures are known as alloys. Africa already supplies several of the metals used in alloys. Yet the continent captures far less value from designing and manufacturing advanced materials than from mining the ores that make them possible. For example, the continent supplies about three-quarters of the world’s manganese, 70% of cobalt, and nearly…

You tell an artificial intelligence agent, an AI capable of autonomous reasoning and multistep actions, “Find me a shirt for less than $30, but do not buy it.” The agent finds one – and places the order anyway. You challenge the charge. The retailer shows the order came through your account. The AI agent provider shows your instruction not to buy. The payment service shows the charge. Each record may be accurate. But nothing in those records links the charge to the task you gave the agent to find – but not buy – a shirt. A conventional chatbot suggests…

In recent days, media reports have revealed several instances where Facebook has paid for content that could be deemed controversial. ABC News Verify found that Facebook had monetised Australian accounts described as having white nationalist, neo-Nazi or anti-vaccine links. According to the report, some of the content they posted even appeared to conflict with Meta’s own monetisation policies. Meta did not answer questions about the individual pages, and their earnings are not public. However, it did state that if creators breach their policies, their earnings will be disabled, and they may be removed entirely for repeated breaches. Payment is different from…