Human beings can be devious. We are capable of trickery and deceit, of withholding information, cheating or lying. The term “Machiavellian” is used for deceitful, manipulative behaviour in pursuit of personal gain or status over ethical principles. Given the increasing role in our lives of artificial intelligence (AI) and the large language models (LLMs) used…
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…
Will AI replace your job? The fear of technology replacing jobs is not new. William Lee patented the mechanised loom for stocking production in the 16th century. In early 19th-century England, a group of textile workers, the Luddites, rioted and destroyed machinery that was automating the production of textiles, threatening their livelihoods. Often, technological advances…
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…
The first use of an unmanned aerial explosive device was when the Austrian army deployed hundreds of balloons carrying explosives in their siege of Venice, which was fighting for independence against Austria. That was in 1849. Technology has moved on since then, but the use of drones has been a military tactic for longer than…
Much discussion about large language models (LLMs) is about their potential to automate tasks and jobs, and possibly replace entire industries such as graphic design and coding. While the hype in many cases exceeds the reality, there is another aspect of AI that needs to be considered: ethics. There are numerous examples of why the…