artificial intelligence

A study says that ChatGPT makes contradictory moral judgements, and that users are influenced by them. Researchers asked questions such as: Would it be right to sacrifice one person to save five others?” Depending on the phrasing of the question, ChatGPT sometimes answered in favour of sacrifice, and sometimes against. Participants were swayed by ChatGPT's statements and underestimated the chatbot's influence on their own judgement. The authors argue that chatbots should be designed to decline giving moral advice, and stress the importance of improving users' digital literacy. 

The functioning of the heart can be studied by the percentage of blood it pumps with each beat, deduced by imaging techniques. Based on analyses by cardiologists, a US clinical trial concludes that an artificial intelligence model outperforms examinations initially performed by imaging technicians in terms of accuracy. According to the authors, the tool could "save physicians time and minimise the most tedious parts of the process".

Meta has applied language modelling to predict the structure of a large collection of proteins. The model, called ESMFold, is being presented this week in the journal Science after being published on the bioRxiv preprint article server in December 2022. EMSFold is faster than similar models such as AlphaFold, developed by Google's DeepMind and EMBL's European Bioinformatics Institute. The sequences of more than 617 million proteins - of which more than a third are predicted with a high degree of confidence - are published in open access in the ESM Metagenomic Atlas.

A study published in the journal PLOS Digital Health has analysed ChatGPT's performance on the US Medical Licensing Exams (USMLE). The results indicate that it could pass or come close to passing the exam.   

Nature's ban on publishing papers written by ChatGPT has brought several debates to the table: is it ethical to use it to produce science texts, and if so, should it sign them? Just as we don't make the Word proofreader a co-author of our articles, let's not make fools of ourselves by giving these new tools the status of co-authors as if they had an entity of their own.

Artificial intelligence algorithms using ChatGPT - the OpenAI company's GPT-3 language model - can identify speech features to predict the early stages of Alzheimer's disease with 80 per cent accuracy. The neurodegenerative disease causes a loss of the ability to express oneself that the algorithms could recognise, according to the journal PLOS Digital Health.

Researchers from FIDMAG Hermanas Hospitalarias and CIBERSAM have announced the development of an algorithm that detects the risk of schizophrenia from fingerprints with a reliability of 70 %. It has been tested on 700 patients with schizophrenia and 850 people without schizophrenia; validation studies are pending.

AlphaCode, the Artificial Intelligence (AI) system for developing computer code developed by DeepMind, can achieve average human-level performance in programming competitions, according to a study published in Science. This could shift the work of programmers to formulating problems for AI to solve.

The database with the predicted 3D structures of almost all catalogued proteins has just been published. The impact on biology is incalculable, from the development of a vaccine against malaria, to understanding Parkinson's disease, the health of honeybees or the fight against plastic pollution. 

A study of more than 630 billion words (mostly in English) used on 3 billion web pages concludes that the term 'people' is not gender-neutral: its meaning is biased towards the concept 'men'. The authors write in Science Advances that they see this as "a fundamental bias in the collective view of our species", relevant because the concept 'people' is "in almost all societal decisions and policies".