Author: The Conversation

It may sound strange, but future Nobel Prizes, and other scientific achievement awards, one day might well be given out to intelligent machines. It could come down just to technicalities and legalities. Swedish chemist Alfred Nobel established the prestigious prizes in his will, written in 1895, a year before his death. He created a fund whose interests would be distributed annually “to those who, during the preceding year, have conferred the greatest benefit to humankind”. Nobel explained how to divide those interests in equal parts, to be given, “one part to the person who made the most important discovery or invention…

Earlier this year, a Hong Kong finance worker was tricked into paying US$25 million to scammers who had used deepfake technology to pretend to be the company’s chief financial officer in a video conference call. Thinking the images on screen were his colleagues, the financier authorised the multi-million dollar transfer to fraudsters posing as friends. It’s a dramatic example, but the bamboozled office worker was far from alone in being fooled by generative AI. This technology, which relies heavily on large language models trained on vast amounts of data to learn and predict the patterns of language, has become increasingly widespread since…

Type text into AI image and video generators, and you’ll often see outputs of unusual, sometimes creepy, pictures. In a way, this is a feature, not a bug, of generative AI. And artists are wielding this aesthetic to create a new storytelling art form. The tools, such as Midjourney to generate images, Runway and Sora to produce videos, and Luma AI to create 3D objects, are relatively cheap or free to use. They allow filmmakers without access to major studio budgets or soundstages to make imaginative short films for the price of a monthly subscription. I’ve studied these new works as the co-director of the AI for Media & Storytelling…

Imagine getting a live art class from Leonardo da Vinci, or having a fully interactive discussion about the meaning of life with Socrates. You can now do this in your living room with a laptop and headset through startups like Ireland’s Engage XR and Sweden’s Hello History, combining the capabilities of artificial intelligence (AI) and the metaverse. Tradition and technology have often been seen as distinct and even counterfactual, but clearly, these technologies are now blurring the lines in ways that can alter how humans engage with cultural heritage. Here are four emerging trends in this space: 1. New kinds of restoration Many…

In an era where digital devices are everywhere, the term “screen time” has become a buzzphrase in discussions about technology’s impact on people’s lives. Parents are concerned about their children’s screen habits. But what if this entire approach to screen time is fundamentally flawed? While researchers have made advances in measuring screen use, a detailed critique of the research in 2020 revealed major issues in how screen time is conceptualized, measured and studied. I study how digital technology affects human cognition and emotions. My ongoing research with cognitive psychologist Nelson Roque builds on that critique’s findings. We categorized existing screen-time measures, mapping them to attributes like…

In Greek mythology, Prometheus is credited with giving humans fire as well as the “spark” that spurred civilisation. One of the unintended consequences of Prometheus’s “gift” was that the need for celestial Gods diminished. Modern humans have been up to all sorts of things that present similar unintended consequences, from using CFCs that led to a hole in the ozone layer to building systems that they do not understand or cannot fully control. In dabbling with artificial intelligence (AI), humans seem to have taken on the role of Prometheus – apparently gifting machines the “fire” that sparked civilisation. Predicting the future is best left…

The original idea for the world wide web emerged in a flurry of scientific thought around the end of World War II. It began with a hypothetical machine called the “memex”, proposed by US Office of Scientific Research and Development head Vannevar Bush in an article entitled As We May Think, published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1945. The memex would help us access all knowledge, instantaneously and from our desks. It had a searchable index, and documents were linked together by the “trails” made by users when they associated one document with another. Bush imagined the memex using microfiche and…

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…