Why AI is a force for good in science communication

How Good Is AI At Detecting Human Emotions? Too Good

Finally, science communicators must be transparent in explaining how they used AI. Generative AI is here to stay – and science communicators and journalists are still working out how best to use it to communicate science. ChatGPT App But if we are to maintain the quality of science journalism – so vital for the public’s trust in science – we must continuously evaluate and manage how AI is incorporated into the scientific information ecosystem.

“Universities must determine how to harness the benefits and mitigate the risks to prepare students for the jobs of the future." Her case highlights the challenge that universities face as they encourage students to become AI literate, whilst discouraging cheating. Hannah, not her real name, is now warning others about the potential consequences of using generative AI to cheat at university. "We had two deadlines really close together and I just ran out of steam," says Hannah, a university student.

That’s just one example Fredrik Ruben, head of the Dynavox Group, gave me in a call recently. Dynavox makes assistive software and hardware for disabilities that impact communication, and while he told me that AI has some risks, it’s also giving his company far more ways to help its patients. Let’s say you have a physical impairment that keeps you from easily typing out words on a keyboard, but you’re otherwise able to understand what you want to say without issue. In this instance, rather than painstakingly sitting down at a desk and hunting-and-pecking your way through multiple paragraphs, you might prefer to give an AI a few sentences on what you want to say, then simply review what it drafts up. Imagine an AI that not only understands what you’re writing but also how you’re feeling.

While this method is simple and intuitive, it has limitations. The BBC is not responsible for the content of external sites. Universities have been trying to understand what AI applications are capable of and introduce guidance on how they can be used. Hannah said she thinks it was a slap on the wrist designed to serve as a warning to other students. She faced an academic misconduct panel, who have the power to expel students found to be cheating.

Their popularity spiked in 2022 when text-to-image AI models like DALL-E, MidJourney, and Stable Diffusion captured the attention of tech communities. These are still around and have improved, but my favorite is Google Gemini. Another embarassing incident was the comically anatomically incorrect picture of a rat created by the AI image generator Midjourney, which appeared in a journal paper that was subsequently retracted. Amateur mushroom pickers, for example, have been warned to steer clear of online foraging guides, likely written by AI, that contain information running counter to safe foraging practices. Many edible wild mushrooms look deceptively similar to their toxic counterparts, making careful identification critical.

Women and physics: navigating history, careers, and the path forward

“We won’t experiment as much anymore, and we will converge on the standard best option because that’s what the A.I. But when it digested one of my articles for a TikTok video, the script was wooden and some of my movements were exaggerated in a creepy way. When I used my avatar to send a loving, A.I.-composed message to my mom, she was horrified.

Kanta Dihal, a lecturer at Imperial College London who researchers the public’s understanding of AI, warns that the impacts of recent advances in generative AI on science communication are “in many ways more concerning than exciting”. Sure, AI can level the playing field by, for example, enabling students to learn video editing skills without expensive tools and helping people with disabilities to access course material in accessible formats. “[But there is also] the immediate large-scale misuse and misinformation,” Dihal says. The Cosmos incident is a reminder that we’re in the early days of using generative AI in science journalism. It’s all too easy for AI to get things wrong and contribute to the deluge of online misinformation, potentially damaging modern society in which science and technology shape so many aspects of our lives.

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There are also outsiders seeking to manipulate the systems’ answers; the search optimization specialists who developed sneaky techniques to appear at the top of Google’s rankings now want to influence what chatbots say. Then there’s Matthew Tosh, a physicist-turned-science presenter specializing in pyrotechnics. He has a progressive disease, which meant he faced an increasing struggle to write in a concise way. ChatGPT, however, lets him create draft social-media posts, which he then rewrites in his own sites.

You can change these settings by clicking “Ad Choices / Do not sell my info” in the footer at any time. The lightweight mobile page you have visited has been built using Google AMP technology. Mr. Mayer-Schönberger said children, with their keen imaginations and constant experimentation, exemplify what sets us apart from machines.

There's one for quick, chatbot-style answers, for example, while another is focused on philosophical advice. Each functions the same way - you click, and speak through the mic, and there's no Hume account required if you want to give it a go. Our new model was able to identify different emotions expressed in X posts. At a bar on the outskirts of Canterbury students here know the limits, and say they only use AI as an aid, like they might a search engine. Some universities ban the use of AI unless specifically authorised, while others allow AI to be used to identify errors in grammar or vocabulary, or permit generative AI content within assessments as long as it is fully cited and referenced. Based on a scan of my face, it had determined my style and optimal color palette.

In the Lowe’s paint section, confronted with every conceivable hue of sage, I took a photo, asked ChatGPT to pick for me and then bought five different samples. When I had a cooking question, I didn’t have to scroll on good names for my ai my smartphone with greasy fingers; I could just ask Spark for help. Physics World represents a key part of IOP Publishing’s mission to communicate world-class research and innovation to the widest possible audience.

Generative AI could even increase inequalities if it becomes too commercial. “Right now there’s a lot of free generative AI available, but I can also see that getting more unequal in the very near future,” Dihal warns. People who can afford to pay for ChatGPT subscriptions, for example, have access to versions of the AI based on more up-to-date training data.

Identifying specific emotions has significant implications for sectors such as marketing, education, and health care. In our new research, we examined whether AI could detect ChatGPT human emotions in posts on X (formerly Twitter). Identifying specific emotions has significant implications for everything from marketing to education and health care.

But as a group, the A.I.-assisted bunch were rated as less creative, because they all converged on similar ideas offered by the software. I appreciate your interest, but I don’t think it would be advisable for me to make important life decisions for you as part of a journalistic experiment. You can foun additiona information about ai customer service and artificial intelligence and NLP. Assistants like myself can provide information and analysis to help inform decisions, we shouldn’t be relied on as the sole decision maker, especially for consequential choices.

AI is not just a tool for analysing data — it’s transforming the way we communicate, work and live. From ChatGP through to AI video generators, the lines between technology and parts of our lives have become increasingly blurred. Amanda Askell, a philosopher and researcher at Anthropic, told me that large language models tended to provide “the average of what everyone wants.” She wears her own white blond hair styled as a kind of mullet with baby bangs.

Generative AI is a step up from “machine learning”, where a computer predicts how a system will behave based on data it’s analysed. Machine learning is used in high-energy physics, for example, to model particle interactions and detector performance. It does this by learning to recognize patterns in existing data, before making predictions and then validating that those predictions match the original data. Machine learning saves researchers from having to manually sift through terabytes of data from experiments such as those at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider. For instance, let’s say you have a photo of your grandmother taken over 50 years ago. Instead of presenting fully formed answers to questions, its generative AI is programmed to prompt users to work out the solution themselves.

I tested 10 AI image generators, and this is my favorite

Judith Donath, a faculty fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center, who studies our relationship with technology, said constant decision making could be a “drag.” But she didn’t think that using A.I. Was much better than flipping a coin or throwing dice, even if these chatbots do have the world’s wisdom baked inside. Just as we’ve outsourced our sense of direction to mapping apps, and our ability to recall facts to search engines, this explosion of A.I. Assistants might tempt us to hand over more of our decisions to machines. Gemini is blocked from generating images containing children or identifiable people like celebrities.

Like I said earlier in this article, I don’t necessarily need all of these. And I’m still skeptical about whether I should let AI try to relay an email from my boss rather than just reading it directly. But when compared to getting paralyzed by the size of my inbox and just skipping over most of it? Granted, you’re probably going to want to supplement or double-check your AI’s suggestions with your own research, but if you’re at a total blank, asking an AI to plan an example stay at your destination can help you know where to start looking.

First, it’s vital to ask the right question – in fact, composing a prompt can take several attempts to get the desired output. When summarizing a document, for example, a good prompt should include the maximum word length, an indication of whether the summary should be in paragraphs or bullet points, and information about the target audience and required style or tone. However, there is a fine line between using AI to speed up your workflow and letting it make content without human input. Many news outlets and writers’ associations have issued statements guaranteeing not to use generative AI as a replacement for human writers and editors. Physics World, for example, has pledged not to publish fresh content generated purely by AI, though the magazine does use AI to assist with transcribing and summarizing interviews. AI can also remove barriers that some people face in communicating science, allowing a wider range of voices to be heard and thereby boosting the public’s trust in science.

What are the alternatives to Gemini's AI images?

This gives it the upper hand in my book, and it's exciting to see how far we'll go if AI is given a few more years to evolve. You'll have a hard time getting an exact number of something or any text in the image generated without errors. I've found that most AI image generators struggle as much unless they're optimized for the job (like Ideogram is for generating text).

As Voiceitt is used, it continues refining the AI model, improving speech recognition over time. The app also has a generative AI model to correct any grammatical errors created during transcription. Each week, I find myself correcting the app’s transcriptions less and less, which is a bonus when facing journalistic deadlines, such as the one for this article. Such methods of statistical language modelling are now fundamental to a range of natural language processing tasks, from building spell-checking software to translating between languages and even recognizing speech. Recent advances in these models have significantly extended the capabilities of generative AI tools, with the “chatbot” functionality of ChatGPT making it especially easy to use.

That efficiency allowed me to spend more time with my daughters, whom I found even more charming than usual. Their creativity and spontaneous dance performances stood in sharp contrast to algorithmic systems that, for all their wonder, often offered generic, unsurprising responses. The chatbots are prediction machines, after all, based on patterns from the past.

As a result, he can maintain that all-important social-media presence while managing his disability at the same time. Granted, something like the above is just a start, but using AI to draft an example itinerary before you begin more in-depth research can cut down on the amount of work you have to do in total. It’ll also let you tailor your needs to your specific trip, which can make it a bit more flexible than other tools. Often, I find using an AI chatbot to search for information to be less helpful than a search engine. I feel like it takes away my ability to see search results myself and is instead acting as a middle man, as if I’m not grown up enough to understand a Google page. But there’s one situation where search engines can’t help, and that’s when you’re not even quite sure what you’re searching for.

• In my experience, Gemini's images are more realistic and accurate.
• Just as we’ve outsourced our sense of direction to mapping apps, and our ability to recall facts to search engines, this explosion of A.I.
• Language modelling dates back to the 1950s, when the US mathematician Claude Shannon applied information theory – the branch of maths that deals with quantifying, storing and transmitting information – to human language.
• They therefore get better responses than users restricted to the “free” version.
• I asked the Storytelling one for a story about a car, and while I wasn't expecting a Pixar-rivalling epic, it tripped over itself multiple times.

If you only have a few data points or all the data you need is available online, you might even be able to get what you need right from the regular chatbot interface, without uploading a document. I’d been wanting to repaint my home office for more than a year, but couldn’t choose a color, so I provided a photo of the room to the chatbots, as well as to an A.I. “Taupe” was their top suggestion, followed by sage and terra cotta. Handlers didn’t just want me to survive the week; they wanted me to thrive. Systems have absorbed an aspirational version of how we live from the material used to train them, similar to how they’ve learned that humans are extremely attractive from photo collections heavy on celebrities and models. They neglected to schedule time for human needs that get less attention, such as dressing, brushing teeth or staring at a wall.

As someone with cerebral palsy, AI has transformed how I work by enabling me to turn my speech into text in an instant (see box below). That’s the idea behind online tuition platforms such as Khan Academy, which has integrated a customized version of ChatGPT into its tuition services. In August 2024 the influential Australian popular-science magazine Cosmos found itself not just reporting the news – it had become the news. Lifehacker has been a go-to source of tech help and life advice since 2005. Our mission is to offer reliable tech help and credible, practical, science-based life advice to help you live better.

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