Author: The Conversation

Artificial intelligence (AI) tools like ChatGPT, DeepSeek, Siri or Google Assistant are developed by the global north and trained in English, Chinese or European languages. In comparison, African languages are largely missing from the internet. A team of African computer scientists, linguists, language specialists and others have been working on precisely this problem for two years already. The African Next Voices project, primarily funded by the Gates Foundation (with other funding from Meta) and involving a network of African universities and organisations, recently released what’s thought to be the largest dataset of African languages for AI so far. We asked them about…

There’s no doubt that artificial intelligence (AI) will have a profound impact on our economies, work and lifestyle. But could this technology also shape the way we think and speak? AI can be used to draft essays and solve problems in mere seconds that otherwise might take us minutes or hours. When we shift to an over-reliance on such tools, we arguably fail to exercise key skills such as critical thinking and our ability to use language creatively. Precedents from psychology and neuroscience research hint that we should take the possibility seriously. There are several precedents for technology reconfiguring our minds,…

How do computers see the world? It’s not quite the same way humans do. Recent advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) make it possible to do more things with computer image processing. You might ask an AI tool to describe an image, for example, or to create an image from a description you provide. As generative AI tools and services become more embedded in day-to-day life, knowing more about how computer vision compares to human vision is becoming essential. My latest research, published in Visual Communication, uses AI-generated descriptions and images to get a sense of how AI models “see” –…

Earlier this year, a band called The Velvet Sundown racked up hundreds of thousands of streams on Spotify with retro-pop tracks, generating a million monthly listeners on Spotify. But the band wasn’t real. Every song, image, and even its backstory, had been generated by someone using generative AI. For some, it was a clever experiment. For others, it revealed a troubling lack of transparency in music creation, even though the band’s Spotify descriptor was later updated to acknowledge it is composed with AI. In September 2025, Spotify announced it is “helping develop and will support the new industry standard for AI disclosures in music credits developed through…

As energy use rises and the planet warms, you might have dreamed of an energy source that works 24/7, rain or shine, quietly powering homes, industries and even entire cities without the ups and downs of solar or wind – and with little contribution to climate change. The promise of new engineering techniques for geothermal energy – heat from the Earth itself – has attracted rising levels of investment to this reliable, low-emission power source that can provide continuous electricity almost anywhere on the planet. That includes ways to harness geothermal energy from idle or abandoned oil and gas wells. In the first…

A proposed constellation of satellites has astronomers very worried. Unlike satellites that reflect sunlight and produce light pollution as an unfortunate byproduct, the ones by US startup Reflect Orbital would produce light pollution by design. The company promises to produce “sunlight on demand” with mirrors that beam sunlight down to Earth so solar farms can operate after sunset. It plans to start with an 18-metre test satellite named Earendil-1 which the company has applied to launch in 2026. It would eventually be followed by about 4,000 satellites in orbit by 2030, according to the latest reports. So, how bad would the light pollution be? And perhaps…

Even at a distance of 150 million kilometres away, activity on the Sun can have adverse effects on technological systems on Earth. Solar flares – intense bursts of energy in the Sun’s atmosphere – and coronal mass ejections – eruptions of plasma from the Sun – can affect the communications, satellite navigation and power grid systems that keep society functioning. On Sept. 24, 2025, NASA launched two new missions to study the influence of the Sun on the solar system, with further missions scheduled for 2026 and beyond. I’m an astrophysicist who researches the Sun, which makes me a solar physicist. Solar physics is part of the wider field of…

Some of the world’s biggest tech firms have soared in value over the last year. As AI evolves at pace, there are hopes that it will improve lives in ways that people could never have imagined a decade ago – in sectors as diverse as healthcare, employment and scientific discovery. OpenAI is now worth US$500 billion (£373 billion), compared with US$157 billion last October. Another firm, Anthropic, has almost trebled its valuation. But the Bank of England has now warned of a possible rapid “correction” due to its concerns about these staggering valuation rises. The question is whether these values are realistic – or based on…

OpenAI’s recent rollout of its new video generator Sora 2 marks a watershed moment in AI. Its ability to generate minutes of hyper-realistic footage from a few lines of text is astonishing, and has raised immediate concerns about truth in politics and journalism. But Sora 2 is rolling out slowly because of its enormous computational demands, which point to an equally pressing question about generative AI itself: What are its true environmental costs? Will video generation make them much worse? The recent launch of the Stargate Project — a US$500 billion joint venture between OpenAI, Oracle, SoftBank and MGX — to build massive AI…

A US judge recently decided not to break up Google, despite a ruling last year that the company held a monopoly in the online search market. Between Google, Microsoft, Apple, Amazon and Meta, there are more than 45 ongoing antitrust investigations in the EU (the majority under the new EU Digital Markets Act) and in the US. While the outcome could have been much worse for Google, other rulings and investigations have the potential to cut to the heart of how the big tech companies make money. As such, these antitrust cases can drive real change around how the tech giants…