Author: The Conversation

Keeping up with the latest digital cons is exhausting. Fraudsters always seem to be one step ahead. But our study found there is one simple thing you can do to drastically reduce your chances of losing money to web scams: slow down. In fact, among the various techniques used by scammers, creating a sense of urgency or the need to act or respond quickly is probably the most damaging. As with many legitimate sales, acting fast reduces your ability to think carefully, evaluate information and make a careful decision. The COVID lockdowns made us all more reliant on online services such as…

When you think about location data on your mobile phone, tablet or laptop, what comes to mind? Mailing addresses? Postal codes? These data indicate where you live, where you work, and the places you visit. When combined with other types of data over time, companies and governments use them to analyze your consumption patterns, occupation, education, health and financial status. Turning location services off only prevents smartphone apps from receiving location data. Smartphones can still be located by cell towers and wireless networks when location services are switched off. This was highlighted by German politician Malte Spitz over a decade ago when he…

In 2016, evidence began to mount that then-South African president Jacob Zuma and a family of Indian-born businessmen, the Guptas, were responsible for widespread “state capture”. It was alleged that the Gupta family influenced Zuma’s political appointments and benefited unfairly from lucrative tenders. The Guptas began to look for a way to divert attention away from them. They enlisted the help of British public relations firm Bell Pottinger, which drew on the country’s existing racial and economic tensions to develop a social media campaign centred on the role of “white monopoly capital” in continuing “economic apartheid”. The campaign was driven by the power of…

The prominent model of information access before search engines became the norm – librarians and subject or search experts providing relevant information – was interactive, personalized, transparent and authoritative. Search engines are the primary way most people access information today, but entering a few keywords and getting a list of results ranked by some unknown function is not ideal. A new generation of artificial intelligence-based information access systems, which includes Microsoft’s Bing/ChatGPT, Google/Bard and Meta/LLaMA, is upending the traditional search engine mode of search input and output. These systems are able to take full sentences and even paragraphs as input and generate personalized natural…

The recent frenzy over language processing tools such as ChatGPT has sent organizations scrambling to provide guidelines for responsible usage. The online publishing platform Medium, for example, has released a statement on AI-generated writing that promotes “transparency” and “disclosure.” My own institution has established an FAQ page about generative AI that calls on educators to make “wise and ethical use” of AI and chatbots. These ethical measures seem quaint, given this week’s release of the more powerful GPT-4, which runs the risk of being a disinformation and propaganda machine. OpenAI claims GPT-4 was able to pass a simulated bar exam in the top 10 per cent, compared to…

It’s easy to envisage other universes, governed by slightly different laws of physics, in which no intelligent life, nor indeed any kind of organised complex systems, could arise. Should we therefore be surprised that a universe exists in which we were able to emerge? That’s a question physicists including me have tried to answer for decades. But it is proving difficult. Although we can confidently trace cosmic history back to one second after the Big Bang, what happened before is harder to gauge. Our accelerators simply can’t produce enough energy to replicate the extreme conditions that prevailed in the first nanosecond. But…

In 2019, the Event Horizon Telescope (EHT) collaboration produced the first-ever image of a black hole, stunning the world. Now, scientists are taking it further. The next generation Event Horizon Telescope  (ngEHT) collaboration aims to create high-quality videos of black holes. But this next-generation collaboration is groundbreaking in other ways, too. It’s the first large physics collaboration bringing together perspectives from natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities. A virtual telescope spanning the planet The larger a telescope, the better it is at seeing things that look tiny from far away. To produce black hole images, we need a telescope almost the size of Earth itself.…

It took a half century for the first American Surgeon General Report to establish the link between tobacco and lung cancer. In response, companies infiltrated media and genetically modified tobacco leaves to make them even more addictive. Curiously, tech companies developed similar compelling algorithms to create dependence among users — these technologies appear innocuous, but should be regulated. There are objectionable consequences regarding the influence of algorithms because they manipulate users by creating false perceptions, dependencies and addiction. Today’s youth are among the first generations to not have experienced life before the internet. For many, their most important generational memory will be that of security concerns associated with…

You have just returned home after a long day at work and are about to sit down for dinner when suddenly your phone starts buzzing. On the other end is a loved one, perhaps a parent, a child or a childhood friend, begging you to send them money immediately. You ask them questions, attempting to understand. There is something off about their answers, which are either vague or out of character, and sometimes there is a peculiar delay, almost as though they were thinking a little too slowly. Yet, you are certain that it is definitely your loved one speaking:…

OpenAI, the artificial intelligence (AI) research company behind ChatGPT and the DALL-E 2 art generator, has unveiled the highly anticipated GPT-4 model. Excitingly, the company also made it immediately available to the public through a paid service. GPT-4 is a large language model (LLM), a neural network trained on massive amounts of data to understand and generate text. It’s the successor to GPT-3.5, the model behind ChatGPT. The GPT-4 model introduces a range of enhancements over its predecessors. These include more creativity, more advanced reasoning, stronger performance across multiple languages, the ability to accept visual input, and the capacity to handle significantly…