Kathryn Conrad[Critical AI 2.1 is a special issue, co-edited by Lauren M.E. Goodlad and Matthew Stone, collecting interdisciplinary essays and think pieces on a wide range of topics involvin

Since the release of ChatGPT, huge amounts of attention and funding have been directed toward chatbots. These A.I. systems are trained on copious amounts of human-generated data and designed to predict the next word in a given sentence. They are hilarious and eerie and at times dangerous. But what if, instead of building A.I. systems that mimic humans, we built those systems to solve some of the most vexing problems facing humanity? In 2020, Google DeepMind unveiled AlphaFold, an A.I. system that uses deep learning to solve one of the most important challenges in all of biology: the so-called protein-folding problem. The ability to predict the shape of proteins is essential for addressing numerous scientific challenges, from vaccine and drug development to curing genetic diseases. But in the 50-plus years since the protein-folding problem had been discovered, scientists had made frustratingly little progress. Enter AlphaFold. By 2022, the system had identified 200 million protein shapes, nearly all the…

Digital Detox version 6 is focused on different digital futures.

A bunch of apps promise to detect ChatGPT. That's great! But before you go uploading student assignments to them, here are a few questions to ask yourself...— Phillip Dawson (@phillipdawson) January 17, 2023

The Elon Musk and Sam Altman-backed chatbot has caught the attention of big names in the tech world as it reached one million users on Monday.