Imagine reading the headline “AI Has Found Potential Alien ‘Technosignatures’ Hidden in Radio Signals From Space.” Or rather don’t imagine, just read the headline, because that headline most certainly exists, although it may not be time to worry about Skynet conspiring with whatever lurks behind the solemn grey masks of Whitley Strieber aliens. Or I suppose in our case, that ChatGPT will write an introduction letter to some sort of intergalactic mid-level bureaucrat. Either way, here’s more from MOTHERBOARD:

“Traditional algorithms operate on a given set of instructions designed by us… thus the algorithm will only ever discover what we tell it to find,” [University of Toronto Graduate Student Peter Ma] said. “The issue is that the nature of an ET signal is not completely known… Hence our proposed approach is to just learn it.”

Ma and colleagues’ neural network was able to find eight unique signals hidden in the data that may potentially be from extraterrestrial sources, but research hasn’t yet been done to confirm these. And while further analysis may be able to confirm these sources as non-Earth based, that doesn’t mean scientists will know exactly what kind of tech they’re connected to, Ma said.

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