Humanising artificial intelligence and dehumanising actual intelligence
January 19, 2024
Millions of people will now have interacted with a new form of accessible artificial intelligence, in the form of ChatGPT, DALL-E or Midjourney. Many will have had (at first) quite strange feelings of empathy with the bot, saying please and thank you and trying not to overburden it. We might also admire its apparent humility …
Climate change, metaphors and me
December 29, 2023
We were sitting round the kitchen table chatting after Christmas, reminiscing about last Christmas. I nostalgically said that last year such conversations had sparked my interest in AI in the form of ChatGPT and given me ideas for blogging. I wondered what I should blog about now. We all agreed that there was always climate …
Making science public 2023: End-of-year round up of blog posts
December 15, 2023
The year 2023 began with a bang. Suddenly there was a new form of ‘artificial intelligence’, and by ‘new’ I mean a form of AI that even I could use and vaguely understand. There was, it seems, some monstrous machine (called LLM) gobbling up everything we have ever produced in science, literature and art and …
The human side of AI: Delivery robots in Milton Keynes
November 17, 2023
This post has been written in collaboration with Alan Miguel Valdez, Lecturer in Technology and Innovation Management, The Open University, Milton Keynes *** At the beginning of November 2023, an international AI Safety Summit took place at Bletchley Park, the iconic location of World War II code breaking feats. What has perhaps not been stressed …
The language of life meets large language models
October 6, 2023
Between about 2014 and 2018 I was involved in the social and communications side of ‘synthetic biology’ as part of the Synthetic Biology Research Centre (SBRC) here at the University of Nottingham, which uses engineering biology approaches to understand and then modify industrially-relevant bacteria. I wrote my last blog post on synthetic biology in 2020. …
Red and blue AI?
August 25, 2023
This is another post about artificial intelligence or AI, but it’s what one may call a bit ‘experimental’. I happened to think about an analogy and ran with it, but it might be a completely inappropriate one. Let me know! Red and green GM About twenty years ago, at the turn of the millennium, I …
Artificial intelligence and existential risk: From alarm to alignment
June 15, 2023
1956 was a momentous year: I and AI were born. Ok, I was born and artificial intelligence was defined as a field of research in computer science. A lot has happened since, especially over the last two decades; and now speculation is rife as to whether AI might lead to the extinction of humanity. By …
Bridge or Barrier – Does generative AI contribute to more culturally inclusive higher education and research?
May 8, 2023
This post by Dr Dimitrinka Atanasova was initially posted on the LSE Impact Blog on 4 May, 2023. It is cross-posted here with permission. Dr Dimitrinka Atanasova is a Lecturer in Intercultural Communication at Lancaster University. Her research focuses on health & science communication (particularly the topics of obesity, mental health, climate change, sustainability, nitrogen …
LLaMas, Alpacas and Dolly 2.0: Exploring an emerging AI menagerie
April 21, 2023
There was a time when llamas were llamas and small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri were small furry creatures from Alpha Centauri. Now we have LLaMas, Alpacas and AI programmes that impersonate cloned sheep. I’ll first say something about ChatGPT, the AI chatbot that launched a hundred fury creatures, then something about another chatbot that …
Chatting with a chatbot about metaphor
March 31, 2023
A week ago my son sent me a link to a tweet in which Ethan Mollick did a little experiment with one of the currently fashionable AI chatbots, a common pastime nowadays. He asked “Bing to look up Tamarian, a made-up Star Trek language that works entirely by metaphors to Tamarian history and myth. Then …
MSP bookmarks
- Twitter May 8, 2017
- Social innovations in Europe #RRI November 3, 2015
- Harvey Graff, the undisciplinarian September 20, 2015
- Replacing Pesticides With Genetics August 31, 2015
- Addressing hazardous chemicals in the circular economy August 25, 2015
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