We are continually told that to make sense of the world being pulled over our eyes, we need media literacy to understand how and when we are being lied to by generative AI that is amplifying the biases in existing media reporting, entrenching inequalities and teaching people from early childhood. What is terrifying is that unless we are very careful, we will never notice because it is not given to humankind to question things that meet our expectations. A brief sojourn through the ways we are manipulated shows us how we are being led deeper into the mire of our existing societal prejudices and also how we can choose to begin the slow process of wading back out again.

You might remember the University news reporting a time capsule being discovered recently during building work near Nuffield Building. While the University Archivist is still exploring the full significance of the contents, she has put together a display comprising a selection of the finds in the Library display space

You may have read a lot recently about tools such as ChatGPT for text or Midjourney for art (there are many others) and realized that artificial intelligence has moved out of the realms of science fiction, and even self-driving cars for that matter, and into the realm of an actually usable technology for individuals. There are lot of reasons you might want to avoid using such tools and yet there are some good academic reasons for wanting to experiment with them.