Author: The Conversation

Online adverts are sometimes so personal that they feel eerie. Even as a researcher in this area, I’m slightly startled when I get a message asking if my son still needs school shirts a few hours after browsing for clothes for my children. Personal messaging is part of a strategy used by advertisers to build a more intense relationship with consumers. It often consists of pop-up adverts or follow-up emails reminding us of all the products we have looked at but not yet purchased. This is a result of AI’s rapidly developing ability to automate the advertising content we are…

Over the course of 2025, deepfakes improved dramatically. AI-generated faces, voices and full-body performances that mimic real people increased in quality far beyond what even many experts expected would be the case just a few years ago. They were also increasingly used to deceive people. For many everyday scenarios — especially low-resolution video calls and media shared on social media platforms — their realism is now high enough to reliably fool nonexpert viewers. In practical terms, synthetic media have become indistinguishable from authentic recordings for ordinary people and, in some cases, even for institutions. And this surge is not limited…

Meta’s decision to end its professional fact-checking program sparked a wave of criticism in the tech and media world. Critics warned that dropping expert oversight could erode trust and reliability in the digital information landscape, especially when profit-driven platforms are mostly left to police themselves. What much of this debate has overlooked, however, is that today, AI large language models are increasingly used to write up news summaries, headlines and content that catch your attention long before traditional content moderation mechanisms can step in. The issue isn’t clear-cut cases of misinformation or harmful subject matter going unflagged in the absence of content moderation.…

Over the past three years, generative artificial intelligence (AI) has had a profound impact on society. AI’s impact on human writing, in particular, has been enormous. The large language models that power AI tools such as ChatGPT are trained on a wide variety of textual data, and they can now produce complex and high-quality texts of their own. Most importantly, the widespread use of AI tools has resulted in the hyperproduction of so-called “AI slop”: low-quality AI-generated outputs produced with minimal or even no human effort. Much has been said about what AI writing means for education, work, and culture. But…

People and institutions are grappling with the consequences of AI-written text. Teachers want to know whether students’ work reflects their own understanding; consumers want to know whether an advertisement was written by a human or a machine. Writing rules to govern the use of AI-generated content is relatively easy. Enforcing them depends on something much harder: reliably detecting whether a piece of text was generated by artificial intelligence (AI). Some studies have investigated whether humans can detect AI-generated text. For example, people who themselves use AI writing tools heavily have been shown to accurately detect AI-written text. A panel of human evaluators can even…

India and South Africa are both navigating one of the toughest challenges of the 21st century: shifting their electricity systems away from ageing coal-fired power stations while ensuring people still have reliable, affordable energy. South Africa generates about 74% of its electricity from coal, one of the highest shares in the world. Electricity plants are ageing, and maintenance is overdue. The electricity sector is highly centralised and dominated by the state-owned energy provider, Eskom. These factors have led to power cuts in the past. Coal accounts for about 70% of India’s electricity generation. However, India has managed faster improvements in electricity…

There are about 15,000 satellites orbiting the Earth. Most of them, like the International Space Station and the Hubble Telescope, reside in low Earth orbit, or LEO, which tops out at about 1,200 miles (2,000 kilometres) above the Earth’s surface. But as more and more satellites are launched into LEO – SpaceX’s Starlink internet constellation alone will eventually send many thousands more there – the region’s getting a bit crowded. Which is why it’s fortunate there’s another orbit, even closer to Earth, that promises to help alleviate the crowding. It’s called VLEO, or very low Earth orbit, and is only 60 to 250 miles (100 to 400 kilometres) above the…

For us linguists, the flurry of “word of the year” announcements from dictionaries and publishers is a holiday tradition as anticipated as mince pies. The words of the year aren’t just a fun peek into new slang and language changes, they also tell us quite a bit about the worries, trends and obsessions of the English-speaking world. And this year’s list has one clear theme. In 2025, artificial intelligence (AI) played a huge role in our offices, social media feeds, music and film, and now – dictionaries. One of the first announcements this year was Collins Dictionary, who selected “vibe coding” as their word…

The vision of mining space for resources is no longer science fiction. The Moon’s proximity to Earth and the presence of precious resources make it an increasingly attractive prospect for exploitation. Resources thought to be present on the Moon include uranium, potassium, phosphorus, water ice, platinum group metals and helium-3. The last of these is a rare isotope that could help power relatively clean fusion energy in future. There are billions of dollars in it for companies able to kickstart mining operations, even if such returns are still years away. Technological breakthroughs in launch and exploration capabilities are occurring at breakneck pace. In…

Imagine this: a band removes its entire music catalogue from Spotify in protest, only to discover an AI-generated impersonator has replaced it. The impersonator offers songs that sound much like the band’s originals. The imposter tops Spotify search results for the band’s music – attracting significant streams – and goes undetected for months. As incredible as it sounds, this is what has happened to Australian prog-rock band King Gizzard & the Lizard Wizard. In July, the band publicly withdrew its music from Spotify in protest at chief executive Daniel Ek’s investments in an AI weapons company. Within months, outraged fans drew attention to a new…