Exploring the power and pitfalls of Artificial Intelligence.
From the invention of gunpowder to the machine gun and tank, the military has always been an early adopter of the latest technological innovations. Computing has had a major impact on warfare ever since Alan Turing’s Bombe machine was used to crack the German Enigma cyphers in World War II. The driverless taxis from Waymo…
As well as impacting many different industries, AI has the potential to be used in various areas of the public sector. In the UK, for example, 18% of all jobs are in the public sector, and the proportion is large in other countries too – 16% in the USA, 20% in France, 29% in Sweden.…
Chat GPT 5, released in August 2025, has produced a range of entertaining hallucinations that went viral, including an image of US presidents, including “Richard Ninun” (instead of Nixon), seemingly born in 1969 but died in 1974, just five years later (Nixon was actually born in 1913 and died in 1994). The very same image…
The English poet William Cowper wrote that “God moves in a mysterious way, his wonders to perform” in his 1773 poem “Light Shining out of Darkness”. The same could be said of large language models (LLMs), the technology underpinning generative AI. LLMs are capable of extremely fluent conversation and answer questions with authority and confidence,…
When it comes to transparency in artificial intelligence (AI) there are different aspects to consider. One is understanding the reasoning process behind AI decisions and what data they use in that decision-making. Given that artificial neural networks are black boxes, that is a topic in itself, and will be the subject of another blog. This…
Artificial intelligence (AI) has long been a subject portrayed in movies, from ground-breaking films like Fritz Lang’s Metropolis (1927) to the robot character Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951) and the lovable Robbie in Forbidden Planet (1956). In recent times, we have seen the artificial intelligence HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey…
We are used to dealing with multiple sensory inputs: the information from our senses of sight, hearing, taste, touch and smell. We combine this information to make decisions easily and unconsciously. By contrast, artificial intelligence (AI) chatbots based on large language models (LLMs) have been mostly restricted to a single mode of communication – text.…
As the large language models (LLMs) that underlie artificial intelligence chatbots like ChatGPT permeate more and more of daily life, people are increasingly coming to depend on them. Students use LLMs to help with their homework, programmers use LLMs to debug code or write new program code, and marketers to write descriptive content about their…
There are very few aspects of life that artificial intelligence (AI) is not embedding itself into, and the sports industry is no exception. There are many different use cases appearing, from athlete training to sports analysis, through to television coverage. When the marathon runner Tola Tamirat crossed the finish line in the 2024 Paris Olympics,…
As generative artificial intelligence (AI) flooded into the public consciousness in late 2022, corporations wrestled with how best to utilise and control it at work. Initial hopes of productivity improvements were tempered by the realisation that the public chatbots like ChatGPT and Claude were executing prompts on their servers. This content, which at work could…