AI x $ = Ads

Desperate for returns on its gargantuan investments, the AI industry is now taking a page from the social media playbook and has set its sights on monetizing consumer attention by integrating advertising into their chatbot interactions.

You’ll eat what you’re sold

AI was supposed to cure cancer, but what it’s actually being used for is to market and sell products to consumers in ever more intrusive and less-transparent ways.

AI in the workplace

New research from Flinders University highlights the need for artificial intelligence (AI) systems to complement – not impede – worker safety and welfare in workplaces.

Australia embraces AI

The Federal Government’s AI plan has dropped its previously cautious approach in favour of a hell-for-leather adoption of AI throughout the economy, regardless of its effects on people, society or jobs.

Machines like us

Will the embodiment of artificial intelligence into human-like androids and other robots empower people or replace them?

The AI advertising avalanche

Artificial intelligence isn’t going to cure cancer, but it is going to fill human culture with infinite quantities of inescapable, thinly disguised and ruthlessly targeted advertising .

‘AI safety’ also means protection from authoritarian abuse

Authoritarian states are already using AI to tighten their grip and without a better balance between innovation and safety, democratic societies could easily innovate themselves into AI ecosystems that centralise power, normalise online surveillance and erode the very democratic values they aim to support.

AI in the news

Though AI cannot replace the close connections local journalists build through in-person relationships, it can help synthesise information from local government, courts and public institutions and help hard pressed local news sources survive on lower budgets as advertising revenue – and therefore journalist jobs – continue to dwindle.

When the ref becomes a player

We shouldn’t be surprised when the political slant of AI chatbots and summaries become an active participant in an already-fragile contest over reality.

Slop science

The hyperproduction of AI slop is undermining and devaluing every aspect of human creativity, from music to writing and art, and its pernicious influence is now permeating science.

AI through the ages

Why are investors so keen to give billions to new firms building AI systems which generate next to no revenue? The allure of replacing every human job with a machine is one answer, but another might be the fact that AI is literally a mythical technology with deep roots in Western culture tapping people’s potential power of creation.

What happens to moral responsibility when algorithms judge people?

Morality is forged between us, woven from the relationships, obligations, and shared vulnerabilities that mark us as human. Whatever the administrative attractions of AI interactions, we cannot cede moral decisions to machines.