Author: The Conversation
By Victor R. Lee, Stanford University It turns out that pop stars Drake and The Weeknd didn’t suddenly drop a new track that went viral on TikTok and YouTube in April 2023. The photograph that won an international photography competition that same month wasn’t a real photograph. And the image of Pope Francis sporting a Balenciaga jacket that appeared in March 2023? That was also a fake. All were made with the help of generative AI, the new technology that can generate humanlike text, audio and images on demand through programs such as ChatGPT, Midjourney and Bard, among others. There’s…
By Primrose Freestone, University of Leicester We carry them everywhere, take them to bed, to the bathroom and for many people they’re the first thing they see in the morning – more than 90% of the world owns or uses a mobile phone and many of us couldn’t manage without one. But while health concerns about phones use usually focus on the distraction they can cause while driving, the possible effects of radiofrequency exposure, or just how addictive they can be. The microbial infection risk of your phone is much less appreciated – but it’s very real. A 2019 survey…
by John Licato, University of South Florida Each day, messages from Nigerian princes, peddlers of wonder drugs and promoters of can’t-miss investments choke email inboxes. Improvements to spam filters only seem to inspire new techniques to break through the protections. Now, the arms race between spam blockers and spam senders is about to escalate with the emergence of a new weapon: generative artificial intelligence. With recent advances in AI made famous by ChatGPT, spammers could have new tools to evade filters, grab people’s attention and convince them to click, buy or give up personal information. As director of the Advancing…
By Casey Fiesler, University of Colorado Boulder As public concern about the ethical and social implications of artificial intelligence keeps growing, it might seem like it’s time to slow down. But inside tech companies themselves, the sentiment is quite the opposite. As Big Tech’s AI race heats up, it would be an “absolutely fatal error in this moment to worry about things that can be fixed later,” a Microsoft executive wrote in an internal email about generative AI, as The New York Times reported. In other words, it’s time to “move fast and break things,” to quote Mark Zuckerberg’s old…
by Robert Olson, Rochester Institute of Technology TikTok is not be the first app to be scrutinized over the potential exposure of U.S. user data, but it is the first widely used app that the U.S. government has proposed banning over privacy and security concerns. So far, the discussion has focused on whether TikTok should be banned. There has been little discussion of whether TikTok could be banned, and there has been almost no discussion of the effects on cybersecurity that a TikTok ban could cause, including encouraging users to sidestep built-in security mechanisms to bypass a ban and access…
by Michelle Lochner, University of the Western Cape New telescopes with unprecedented sensitivity and resolution are being unveiled around the world – and beyond. Among them are the Giant Magellan Telescope under construction in Chile, and the James Webb Space Telescope, which is parked a million and a half kilometres out in space. This means there is a wealth of data available to scientists that simply wasn’t there before. The raw data off just a single observation from the MeerKAT radio telescope in South Africa’s Northern Cape province can measure a terabyte. That’s enough to fill a laptop computer’s hard…
BY S. Shyam Sundar, Penn State; Cason Schmit, Texas A&M University, and John Villasenor, University of California, Los Angeles From fake photos of Donald Trump being arrested by New York City police officers to a chatbot describing a very-much-alive computer scientist as having died tragically, the ability of the new generation of generative artificial intelligence systems to create convincing but fictional text and images is setting off alarms about fraud and misinformation on steroids. Indeed, a group of artificial intelligence researchers and industry figures urged the industry on March 29, 2023, to pause further training of the latest AI technologies…
by Mzukisi Qobo, University of the Witwatersrand Since the UN Climate Change Agreement was signed by 196 nations in December 2015, many countries have announced policies to reduce their fossil fuel emissions. Their commitments are set out in nationally determined actions they’ll be taking to achieve this. But the transition must navigate political economy tensions, especially in developing countries. Take South Africa, for example. It has deep-seated socioeconomic challenges, such as inequality and unemployment. Its unemployment rate (including people who have given up looking for jobs) is unacceptably high at 42.5%. The country is also among the most unequal in…
The International Criminal Court (ICC) has issued an international arrest warrant for Russian president Vladimir Putin for alleged war crimes regarding the unlawful deportation of children from Ukraine to Russia. Such acts are war crimes under two articles of the Rome Statute, which established the court. ICC arrest warrants against sitting heads of state are rare. Putin faces arrest if he sets foot in any of the 123 signatory states to the statute. Of these, 33 are African states. The issue could come to a head in August when South Africa is set to host the 15th summit of the…
by Mike Rogan, Rhodes University; Max Gallien, Institute of Development Studies; Nana Akua Anyidoho, University of Ghana, and Vanessa van den Boogaard, Institute of Development Studies In May 2022, the government in Ghana introduced a deeply unpopular tax on mobile money transactions, known as the e-levy. When it was introduced, the levy was structured as a 1.5% charge on all electronic and mobile money transactions over 100 cedis per day. The e-levy was designed to raise more money for the government by extracting larger tax contributions from Ghana’s informal sector. About 90% of total employment in Ghana is informal and…