Ella Butler’s research while affiliated with Australian National University and other places

Since the advent of the COVID‐19 pandemic, several ways of understanding time have emerged: what we may call ‘COVID time’. Based on 40 qualitative online interviews in 2022 with Australians living across the continent, this article examines how people situated themselves and COVID‐19 in historical time. It further explores how material aspects, place and space (or “pandemic materialities”) factored into lived experiences and temporal imaginaries. We focus on how time‐related concepts such as synchronisation and the definition of crises and events are interrelated in the participants’ understandings of COVID as either over or a continuing crisis. The sociomaterial dimensions that served to alert people to risk and encourage them to engage in preventive action are identified as ways in which COVID time was experienced, remembered, understood and imagined. While some respondents claimed that the present moment was ‘post‐COVID’, for others, the pandemic was far from over in 2022 and indeed stretched into the future. We use a sociomaterial lens to show how respondents portray the ‘temporal technologies’ and ‘objectifications’ of the event of COVID‐19—the tangible materialisations of its temporal status as either relegated to the past or continuing as a mode of present and future crisis.

There has been great interest in the potential for generative AI and large language models (LLMs), and ChatGPT in particular, to contribute to the fields of medicine and public health. This position paper provides a brief overview of the literature that has been published on the potential uses and benefits of these tools for medical and public health applications. It discusses how social researchers can contribute to analyses and assessments of these applications, particularly in relation to the lived experiences of those who use them in healthcare settings or at home, including consideration of patients, clinicians and other healthcare workers. The paper also discusses impacts on the workers who train and process the data used for these novel technologies and calls for an expanded perspective that acknowledges the impacts of the development and use of generative AI and LLMs on planetary health.

This report provides a scoping review of the literature on the ways that novel generative AI tools are being applied to living things and other elements of ecosystems and the natural environment. The report outlines several areas where generative AI is being deployed in new research projects and industry applications. These include animal communication and agriculture and plant cultivation as well as environmental sustainability, biodiversity, climate change and nature conservation initiatives. The report also details some of the negative environmental costs and ethical issues associated with the manufacture, training and infrastructure that support generative AI and large language models more generally.