In the 1970s a young gorilla known as Koko drew worldwide attention with her ability to use human sign language. But skeptics maintain that Koko and other animals that "learned" to speak (including chimpanzees and dolphins) could not truly understand what they were "saying"--and that trying to make other species use human language, in which symbols represent things that may not be physically present, is futile. "There's one set of researchers that's keen on finding out whether animals can engage in symbolic communication and another set that says, 'That is anthropomorphizing. We need to ... understand nonhuman communication on its own terms,'" says Karen Bakker, a professor at the University of British Columbia and a fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. Now scientists are using advanced sensors and artificial intelligence technology to observe and decode how a broad range of species, including plants, already share information with their own communication methods.

But no amount of amateur water drumming arranged in GarageBand could be even half as weird--and fun--as some of the music that AI can make these days. Welcome back to Science, Quickly.

We have entered the brave new world of AI chatbots. This means everything from reenvisioning how students learn in school to protecting ourselves from mass-produced misinformation. It also means heeding the mounting calls to regulate AI to help us navigate an era in which computers write as fluently as people. So far, there is more agreement on the need for AI regulation than on what this would entail. Mira Murati, head of the team that created the chatbot app ChatGPT--the fastest growing consumer-Internet app in history--said governments and regulators should be involved, but she didn't suggest how.

Tech research company OpenAI has just released an updated version of its text-generating artificial intelligence program, called GPT-4, and demonstrated some of the language model's new abilities. Not only can GPT-4 produce more natural-sounding text and solve problems more accurately than its predecessor. It can also process images in addition to text. But the AI is still vulnerable to some of the same problems that plagued earlier GPT models: displaying bias, overstepping the guardrails intended to prevent it from saying offensive or dangerous things and "hallucinating," or confidently making up falsehoods not found in its training data. On Twitter, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman described the model as the company's "most capable and aligned" to date.

To read the news, the sanctity of everything from college application essays to graduate school tests to medical licensing exams is imperiled by easy access to advanced artificial intelligence like ChatGPT, the AI chatbot that can produce remarkably clear, long-form answers to complex questions. Educators in particular worry about students turning to ChatGPT to help them complete assignments. One proposed solution is to roll back the clock to the 20th century, making students write exam essays using pen and paper, without the use of any Internet-connected electronic devices. The University of California, Los Angeles, where I teach, is considering making it an honor code violation to use ChatGPT for taking an exam or writing a paper. This semester, I am telling the students in my class at the UCLA School of Law that they are free to use ChatGPT in their writing assignments.

A year of incredible science news was complemented with wide-ranging commentary at Scientific American. Our opinion section featured some of the best and brightest minds, taking us to the front lines of COVID, teaching us about the many fraught Supreme Court decisions involving science and evidence, and more. We learned, for example, about the pitfalls of artificial intelligence, how racists misuse evolutionary biology, and how our children's troubled mental health is another ongoing epidemic. Whether they were thought-provoking, deeply moving or challenged long-held beliefs, here are some of our editors' favorite opinion articles of 2022. This year, language models proved they can write humanlike text, with one AI chatbot generating such impressive responses that it convinced an engineer it was sentient.

It seemed as if the world was plunging from one crisis to another this year. Just as most countries broke free from the shackles of the pandemic, the horror of war returned to Europe, millions around the world suffered at the hands of extreme weather, and the double pain of energy shortages and inflation arrived. Here's our rundown of the best news to come out of 2022. More than one-fifth of all electricity in the US now comes from hydropower, wind, and solar, meaning that renewables have narrowly overtaken coal and nuclear, which make up 20 percent and 19 percent of the energy mix respectively. The only other year this was the case was 2020--but back then overall power generation was reduced due to the pandemic.

The text-generating program ChatGPT, developed by artificial intelligence research company OpenAI, can write about many subjects in a variety of …

Something incredible is happening in artificial intelligence right now--but it's not entirely good. Everybody is talking about systems like ChatGPT, which generates text that seems remarkably human. This makes it fun to play with, but there is a dark side, too. Because they are so good at imitating human styles, there is risk that such chatbots could be used to mass-produce misinformation. To get a sense of what it does best at its best, consider this example generated by ChatGPT, sent to me over e-mail by Henry Minsky (son of Marvin Minsky, one of AI's foundational researchers).

Artificial intelligence does not have to threaten humans; it can also work with us to solve big problems. Are you still feeling a little wary of algorithms? We rounded up a slew of stories from the past year that demonstrate the many ways in which this technology can have a positive impact. This year AI revealed its prowess as a powerful tool to help prevent climate change from wreaking irreversible damage to the planet, something that requires more than one solution. Researchers have been using AI to visualize the future effects of floods and wildfires, improve climate decision-making, monitor forests and share data. Other climate projects powered by artificial intelligence have included building digital twins of the planet to test out the impact of different warming-mitigation policies and mapping thinning sea ice.