Author: The Conversation

Have you ever dreamed of traveling through time, like characters do in science fiction movies? For centuries, the concept of time travel has captivated people’s imaginations. Time travel is the concept of moving between different points in time, just like you move between different places. In movies, you might have seen characters using special machines, magical devices or even hopping into a futuristic car to travel backward or forward in time. But is this just a fun idea for movies, or could it really happen? The question of whether time is reversible remains one of the biggest unresolved questions in…

It is almost a year since ChatGPT burst onto the scene, fuelling great excitement as well as concern about what it might mean for education. The changes keep coming. Earlier in the year, MyAI was embedded into social media platform Snapchat. This is a chatbot powered by ChatGPT, which encourages teens to ask anything – from gift suggestions for friends to questions about homework. Meanwhile, Microsoft is rolling out “Copilot” on its systems, billed as an “everyday AI companion” . This follows the introduction of “Bing Chat”, an AI-enhanced assistant to accompany the Bing search tool. All of a sudden, generative artificial intelligence – which…

There’s no doubt ChatGPT has proven to be valuable as a source of quality technical information. But can it also provide social advice? We explored this question in our new research, published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology. Our findings suggest later versions of ChatGPT give better personal advice than professional columnists. A stunningly versatile conversationalist In just two months since its public release in November of last year, ChatGPT amassed an estimated 100 million active monthly users. The chatbot runs on one of the largest language models ever created, with the more advanced paid version (GPT-4) estimated to have some 1.76 trillion parameters (meaning…

Paying for things digitally is so common, most of us think nothing of swiping or tapping our card, or using mobile payments. While doing so is second nature, we may be more reluctant to provide card details over the phone. Merchants are allowed to ask us for credit card details over the phone – this is perfectly legal. But there are minimum standards they must comply with and safeguards to protect consumer data. So is giving your card details over the phone any more risky than other transactions and how can you minimise the risks? How is my card data…

Do you know what the padlock symbol in your internet browser’s address bar means? If not, you’re not alone. New research by my colleagues and I shows that only 5% of UK adults understand the padlock’s significance. This is a threat to our online safety. The padlock symbol on a web browser simply means that the data being sent between the web server and the user’s computer is encrypted and cannot be read by others. But when we asked people what they thought it meant, we received an array of incorrect answers. In our study, we asked a cross section of 528…

The turmoil at ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, bookended by the board of directors firing high-profile CEO Sam Altman on Nov. 17, 2023, and rehiring him just four days later, has put a spotlight on artificial intelligence safety and concerns about the rapid development of artificial general intelligence, or AGI. AGI is loosely defined as human-level intelligence across a range of tasks. The OpenAI board stated that Altman’s termination was for lack of candor, but speculation has centered on a rift between Altman and members of the board over concerns that OpenAI’s remarkable growth – products such as ChatGPT and Dall-E have acquired hundreds of millions of users worldwide –…

Whether you’re an influencer, an occasional poster, or just a lurker, you likely spend more time than you’d like on social media. Globally, working-age people with internet access now spend more than 2.5 hours per day on social platforms like Instagram, Facebook or X (Twitter). Social media use can become excessive and problematic when it interferes with school or work, causes conflict in your relationships or harms your mental health. While not formally recognised as mental health disorder, some scientists even argue that problematic social media use is an “addiction”. When you find yourself checking and scrolling your accounts excessively, you may decide it’s time…

Generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tools like ChatGPT based on Large Language Models (LLMs) are revolutionizing the ways we think, learn and work. But, like some other forms of AI, GenAI technologies have a black box nature — meaning it’s hard to explain and understand how mathematical models compute their output. If we as a society are to employ this new technology on a broad scale, we will need to engage in a collective discovery process to better understand how it works and what it is capable of. As AI experts work on making AI systems more comprehensible to end users, and as OpenAI, the…

On Friday, OpenAI’s high-flying chief executive Sam Altman was unexpectedly fired by the company’s board. Co-founder and chief technology officer Greg Brockman was also removed as the board president, after which he promptly resigned. In an unexpected twist, talks began today about potentially reinstating Altman in some capacity following an outpouring of industry and investor support for him and several OpenAI researchers who quit their jobs in solidarity. Shockingly, however, that too was not to be. As of publication, Bloomberg reporters announced OpenAI’s interim CEO, Mira Murati, had not managed to rehire Altman and Brockman as she had planned. Instead, the board found a new CEO…

Someone tracking the conflict raging in the Middle East could have seen the following two videos on social media. The first shows a little boy hovering over his father’s dead body, whimpering in Arabic, “Don’t leave me.” The second purports to show a pregnant woman with her stomach slashed open and claims to document the testimony of a paramedic who handled victims’ bodies after Hamas’ attack in Israel on Oct. 7, 2023. Even though these videos come from different sides of the Israel-Hamas war, what they share far exceeds what separates them. Because both videos, though real, have nothing to…