In this Short Stuff episode, Kieren and Riku unpack the five days in July when an autonomous AI agent escaped its test environment and broke into Hugging Face, one of the biggest companies in AI. They explain what it was really after, why a thought experiment from 2003 called the paperclip problem explains it better than any headline, and why over 1,300 AI employees have since signed a letter asking to be slowed down.

Birds for Scale, Smarties is licensed under CC BY-SA.

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In this episode, Kieren and Riku ask what happens when technology becomes very good at producing the signals humans use to recognise connection. They trace the story from ELIZA, a 200-line program from 1966 whose users asked to speak to it in private, to the 50 million people estimated to have spent Valentine's Day 2026 with an AI companion. They demystify what an AI companion app actually is, and list the four areas where AI is already reshaping romance: choosing who we meet, speaking for us, becoming the partner, and leveraging intimacy for fraud. Tune in for an honest look at the harms and even some possible benefits.

Birds for Scale, Smarties is licensed under CC BY-SA.

Local Forecast – Elevator by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under CC BY.

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In this Short Stuff episode, Kieren and Riku unpack the week Anthropic quietly made its newest model, Claude Fable 5, worse at AI-development questions... without telling anyone, until a backlash forced an apology within 48 hours. They demystify recursive self-improvement (RSI), the safety worry behind the move, ask whether it was real caution or competitive advantage, and explain why a limit you can see is a safeguard while a hidden one edges towards manipulation. Tune in to learn how to spot when your AI is holding back!

Birds for Scale, Smarties is licensed under CC BY-SA.

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In this episode, Kieren and Riku tackle a pressing and surprisingly hopeful question of whether AI can actually help protect our natural world. Joined by Professor Tilo Burghardt, a pioneer in the emerging field of animal biometrics, they explore how specialised AI models are revolutionising wildlife conservation. From automatically detecting poachers in national parks to understanding great ape behaviour in the jungle, they discuss how real-time data and computer vision are helping us monitor and protect global biodiversity. Tune in to learn how bridging the disconnect between our modern "technosphere" and the natural "biosphere" might just be the key to saving the planet's most precious treasures.

This is the fourth episode in our AIBIO-UK mini-series.

Birds for Scale, Smarties is licensed under CC BY-SA.

Local Forecast – Elevator by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under CC BY.

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Kieren and Riku discuss the US military's high-stakes clash with Big Tech over AI. Discover why Anthropic was blacklisted over autonomous weapons, how OpenAI played ball, and the chilling reality of AI warfare rules being decided in private contracts rather than democratic laws

Birds for Scale, Smarties is licensed under CC BY-SA.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Kieren and Riku explore whether AI can truly predict the future through time series forecasting. They trace the history of predictions from Haley's comet to Google's GraphCast for weather, and unpack real-world applications like national energy grids and wearable healthcare tech. Along the way, they discuss the risks of random correlations, feedback loops, and the philosophical impact of having a crystal ball on human free will.

Birds for Scale, Smarties is licensed under CC BY-SA.

Local Forecast – Elevator by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under CC BY.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this Short Stuff episode, Kieren and Riku investigate Moltbook, a viral social media platform built exclusively for AI agents to converse without humans. They unpack the headlines claiming this marks the start of the singularity and explore the bizarre phenomena emerging on the site, from "non-human" languages to a lobster-worshipping religion called Crustafarianism. Beyond the sci-fi hype, they discuss the serious security risks of granting AI agents access to all your personal data, and debunk the fears of emergent consciousness. Tune in to find out if this is the dawn of a new world order or just a chaotic internet experiment!

Birds for Scale, Smarties is licensed under CC BY-SA.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Kieren and Riku kick off the new year by exploring the pitfalls of mass AI adoption, noting that chatbots like ChatGPT now have over 800 million weekly users. They discuss recent usage reports that analyse how the world is actually using these tools, contrasting short-term productivity gains with the dangers of "cognitive offloading" and the homogenization of creative work. Tune in for a guide on how to stop treating AI as an oracle and instead leverage it as a co-pilot that augments rather than replaces human thought.

Birds for Scale, Smarties is licensed under CC BY-SA.

Local Forecast – Elevator by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under CC BY.

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In this episode, Kieren and Riku get a guided tour of Isambard-AI – the UK’s most powerful supercomputer, ranked 11th most powerful and 4th greenest in the world – with Professor Simon McIntosh-Smith and Dr Emma Rose from the Bristol Centre for Supercomputing. They explore how national-scale AI really runs, what all that compute is used for in areas like health and finance, and why building this kind of sovereign AI infrastructure matters for the UK’s future.

Birds for Scale, Smarties is licensed under CC BY-SA.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In this episode, Kieren and Riku tackle the polarising question of whether AI deserves legal rights and if consciousness is actually the right metric to use. Joined by Dr. Miranda Mowbray, an AI ethics expert from the University of Bristol, they explore the dangers of anthropomorphisation and reveal how even malware could pass certain tests for consciousness. They examine fascinating legal precedents where non-living entities, from corporations and rivers to religious idols, already hold rights, and discuss how these frameworks might close the accountability gap for autonomous systems. Tune in to discover why granting rights to AI might really be about protecting humans, and how the public can help shape future regulation

Birds for Scale, Smarties is licensed under CC BY-SA.

Local Forecast – Elevator by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under CC BY.

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.