Generative artificial intelligence (AI) has many useful applications, such as automating repetitive tasks, language translation and coding software. However, its ability to produce “deepfakes” of images, audio and video is a controversial and potentially troubling area. There are two main approaches that are used in AI to producing deepfakes. The first is a technique called…
The word “robot” was coined in K. Čapek’s play ‘Rossum’s Universal Robots’ in 1920, which depicted artificial beings created to perform manual labour. The word “robot” (“robota: in Czech) literally means “drudgery”. Well before this, in 1770, “The Mechanical Turk” was exhibited, which played chess very well, but this turned out to just be a…
The release of ChatGPT in November 2022 opened the eyes of most of the world to the power of large language models (LLMs). This is the core technology that underpins ChatGPT and its rivals Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, etc, as well as their image-generating cousins Midjourney, Leonardo, Imagen, Firefly and Sora. Excitement about LLMs reached a…
Artificial intelligence requires plenty of computing power. Large language models (LLMs), the technology underlying generative AI tools such as ChatGPT, require vast amounts of data to train on, and in turn, this training requires massive computing power. Executing a prompt in an AI chatbot requires processing power, and it is estimated that executing an AI…
When most people think about artificial intelligence (AI) they may associate it with chatbots like ChatGPT and its rivals, or with elaborate computer models running in remote data centres. People tend not to think about AI being used in consumer devices that they encounter every day: thermostats, TV streaming services, fridges and telephones, yet AI…
The large language models (LLMs) that underlie generative AI rely on being trained on vast volumes of data. This may be text, images or video, but in any case, the answers that a fully trained LLM will give to you will be heavily dependent on the nature of that training data. If you are going…
In case you were in any doubt that ChatGPT and its AI cousins were heavily used by students to do their homework, data shows that the usage of ChatGPT dropped substantially during the 2025 summer break, just as it did the previous two summers. Students are heavy users of generative AI, which will not come…