Imagine a group of young men gathered at a picturesque college campus in New England, in the United States, during the northern summer of 1956. It’s a small casual gathering. But the men are not here for campfires and nature hikes in the surrounding mountains and woods. Instead, these pioneers are about to embark on […] … learn more→

Humanoid robots have long been a staple of science fiction, but there is now real progress being made. A range of new models made by or backed by the likes of Boston Dynamics, Tesla and OpenAI are able to walk and move like humans, as well as perform feats of agility and dexterity. But it’s the ability to incorporate artificial […] … learn more→

Language enables people to transmit thoughts to each other because each person’s brain responds similarly to the meaning of words. In our newly published research, my colleagues and I developed a framework to model the brain activity of speakers as they engaged in face-to-face conversations. We recorded the electrical activity of two people’s brains as they engaged in unscripted […] … learn more→

After widespread backlash, Google pulled its “Dear Sydney” Gemini ad from Olympics coverage. The ad featured its generative AI chatbot tool, Gemini, formerly known as Bard. The advertisement featured a father and his daughter, a fan of United States Olympic track and field athlete Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. The father, despite considering himself “pretty good with words,” uses Gemini to […] … learn more→

New scientific understanding and engineering techniques have always impressed and frightened. No doubt they will continue to. OpenAI recently announced that it anticipates “superintelligence” – AI surpassing human abilities – this decade. It is accordingly building a new team, and devoting 20% of its computing resources to ensuring that the behaviour of such AI systems will be aligned […] … learn more→

The phenomenal growth in artificial intelligence tools has made it easy to create a story quickly, complicating a reader’s ability to determine if a news source or article is truthful or reliable. For instance, earlier this year, people were sharing an article about the supposed suicide of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s psychiatrist as if it were real. It […] … learn more→

Consider a typical morning routine: coffee in hand, you peruse Twitter (now rebranded as X) to catch up on the news. Headlines appear among a flurry of tweets on everything from memes about political leaders to cultural Marxism, free speech, making America great again and draining the swamp. Before your day has even begun, a burst of […] … learn more→

The government recently announced ambitions to expand the use of artificial intelligence (AI) in New Zealand’s classrooms. But as the technology rapidly changes, it is not clear how this would work or what it will mean for teachers and learners. Science Minister Judith Collins’ vision is for every student to have their own AI tutor. […] … learn more→

For about 10 years now, I’ve had a profitable side hustle teaching writing. ANU has a generous external consulting policy, which means I can fly all over the country, and the world, teaching academics to be better writers. With the invention of ChatGPT (or as my sister Anitra dubbed it, ChattieG), I expected this work […] … learn more→

Fact-checking and media literacy specialists thought they had found a way to combat “ deepfakes ” , these video manipulations based on artificial intelligence, with verification tools such as Invid-Werify and the work of image analysis skills (visual literacy), with programs such as Youverify.eu . But a few recent cases show that a new form of cyberattack has just been […] … learn more→