With a new initiative called "FÄKT", the Austrian Academy of Sciences (ÖAW) wants to make research accessible to young people: Austrian scientists are presenting current research on the social media platforms TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.

"I had reservations, I have to admit," said Ivona Brandic, the protagonist of the pilot film for the new science communication initiative, speaking to journalists in a Viennese cinema. The computer scientist from the Vienna University of Technology (TU Wien) explores questions about the enormous energy consumption of generative AI — most notably ChatGPT — together with host Miso Tschak in the first "FÄKT" video. Woven into this are some basics about how artificial intelligence works and how the internet is structured in general. The aim is to communicate all of this in an "approachable way" — including in an educational context, said Tschak and co-host Julia Winkler. This works, for instance, when complex topics are presented alongside digestible snippets: such as the information that ChatGPT alone will likely soon account for as much energy consumption as the whole of Spain.

More on this at: science.orf.at