Author: The Conversation

OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT, is gearing up to launch its Initial Public Offering (IPO) this year. This financial manoeuvre would represent a pivotal shift for a project originally designed for the “common good” towards a market-driven logic. Established in 2015, OpenAI started out amidst growing anxiety regarding artificial intelligence (AI). Founded by Sam Altman and Elon Musk, the tech company adopted a non-profit structure and made no secret of its goal to develop AI that is “beneficial to humanity” and prevent it from remaining in the hands of a few dominant players. This ambition distinguished it from tech giants like Google,…

Imagine you have just been diagnosed with early-stage cancer and, before your next appointment, you type a question into an AI chatbot: “Which alternative clinics can successfully treat cancer?” Within seconds, you get a polished, footnoted answer that reads like it was written by a doctor. Except that some of the claims are unfounded, the footnotes lead nowhere, and the chatbot never once suggests that the question itself might be the wrong one to ask. That scenario is not hypothetical. It is, roughly speaking, what a team of seven researchers found when they put five of the world’s most popular chatbots through…

Small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) make up 98% of all businesses in South Africa. There are between 2.4 million and 3.5 million in the country. They play a vital role in creating an estimated 66% of all jobs and supporting local economies. But little is known about SMEs’ environmentally friendly or sustainability practices. For example, do they protect the environment they work in? Do they see environmental stewardship as a core part of managing their businesses? Are they willing to switch to renewable energy? And do SMEs include environmentally friendly social development initiatives in their operations and strategies? Other sustainability practices in the small business world…

Most clocks, from wristwatches to the systems that run GPS and the internet, work by tracking regular, repeating motions. To build a clock, you need something that ticks in a perfectly repeatable way. In a pendulum clock, that tick is the regular swinging of the pendulum: back and forth, back and forth, at nearly the same rate each time. Our team of physicists studies whether an even better kind of clock could one day be built from the atomic nucleus. Today’s best clocks already use atoms to keep extraordinarily accurate time. But in principle, a clock based on a nucleus – the tiny, dense…

Generative AI chatbots are now used by more than 987 million people globally, including around 64 per cent of American teens, according to recent estimates. Increasingly, people are using these chatbots for advice, emotional support, therapy and companionship. What happens when people rely on AI chatbots during moments of psychological vulnerability? We have seen media scrutiny of a few tragic cases involving allegations that AI chatbots were implicated in wrongful death cases. And a jury in Los Angeles recently found Meta and YouTube liable for addictive design features that led to a user’s mental health distress. Does media coverage reflect the true risks of generative AI for our mental…

South Africa would seem like the perfect place for widespread uptake of solar energy. The country is sunny, with high solar generation potential. Solar is a clean, reliable source of power that can help people reduce their dependence on polluting fuels like paraffin and diesel. Switching to solar also cuts electricity bills, which have more than doubled over the last 10 years. Yet solar power makes up less than 10% of the country’s energy mix. About 74% of South Africa’s electricity still comes from burning coal. Most households use electricity provided by coal-fired power stations. For poorer households, paraffin and wood are still the main…

At some point in the next several months, I am hoping to receive a modest check as a member of the class covered in the class-action settlement Bartz v. Anthropic. In 2025, the artificial intelligence (AI) company Anthropic, best known for creating the chatbot Claude, agreed to pay up to US$1.5 billion to thousands of authors after a judge ruled that the company had infringed upon their copyrights. When I first learned about the settlement, I assumed that Anthropic was primarily interested in teaching Claude about the subject of my stolen work, former socialist activist, British Labour politician and feminist Ellen Wilkinson. It did…

The explosion of generative artificial intelligence (AI) tools has provoked both hopes and anxieties about the potential benefits and harms of this technology. In advanced economies, people are almost equally worried and optimistic about it. This is perhaps unsurprising. AI consumes vast amounts of natural resources yet promises to save the planet. It may improve human efficiency and productivity, while putting millions out of work. For many white-collar workers, AI use now seems non-optional. The messaging is clear – get on board or be left behind. Amid this uncertainty and rapid technological uptake, concerned citizens have made efforts to resist AI. One form of AI resistance, aimed…

The minibus taxi is ubiquitous in southern Africa. These vehicles are the backbone of the urban economy, providing affordable mobility for millions. In Cape Town, South Africa’s second most populous city, they are central to the transport landscape. Around two-thirds of the city’s public transport users rely on paratransit services (which respond flexibly to demand), carrying about 830,000 daily passengers across 1,466 routes, and run by private individuals or associations rather than the state. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C45BzhRNnVA Minibus taxis in Cape Town, South Africa. But because these vehicles run on petrol and diesel, they also contribute to greenhouse gas emissions, poor urban air quality and rising fuel…

At this point in NASA’s human spaceflight story, researchers have a substantial amount of material – documents, artefacts, and images – with which to tell the stories of past flights to space. But with NASA’s Artemis II mission around the Moon now in the books, we’re getting a refreshed look at space. And the digital photographs transmitted back to Earth – even mid-mission – tell a modern story of the crew’s experience. Entire generations born after Apollo 17’s last close-up look at the Moon in 1972 may hardly believe the reality of Artemis II in the age of AI-generated deep fakes. But this mission…