The chatbot, which became the fastest-growing app in history with 100 million users in just two months, turned artificial intelligence into one of the biggest stories in 2023. Consequently, ChatGPT was the most visited Wikipedia article last year.

READ MORE: As ChatGPT hits its one-year anniversary, what have we learnt?

The fastest-growing app marked its first anniversary in November 2023. In that time, it reached over 180 million users and continued to dominate many technology-related headlines around the globe, for both positive and negative reasons.

According to data presented by AltIndex.com, the ChatGPT article was visited almost 50 million times last year, far more than any other topic.

It remains that when looking for answers, most people turn to Wikipedia. So, the most-viewed articles provide a trend of what interests’ society as well as a leading metric of what knowledge people are seeking.

According to data from the Wikimedia Foundation, the English version of Wikipedia received more than 84 billion visits in 2023, with people reading topics from sports competitions and football players to box office movies. In terms of the page dedicated to ChatGPT, the English Wikipedia ChatGPT article hit between 100,000 and 400,000 page views almost every day, bringing the 2023 total to 49.4 million page visits.

In terms of other popular Wikipedia views, these were as diverse as Cristiano Ronaldo, and the blockbuster movies Oppenheimer and Barbie. The two films got 28.3 million and 18 million page views in 2023, respectively, while the footballer related article was clicked 17.4 million times.

The public interest in ChatGPT and generative AI is part of the considerable potential this still-developing market has. A few years ago few were considering, let alone using, using generative AI daily to automate tasks, write documents, do market research, or even basic coding.

This form of automation, is assisting with generative AI becoming one of the largest revenue streams in the AI industry, generating 25 percent of total revenue by 2028. In addition, according to a Statista survey, the generative AI industry is expected to grow 48 percent year-over-year and hit $66.6 billion in 2024. By 2028, this figure will jump over $156 billion, showing a massive 250 percent growth in five years.

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Australia’s eSafety Commission said these “deep cuts” and the reinstatement of thousands of banned accounts had created a “perfect storm” for the spread of harmful content. 

The regulator has in recent months zeroed in on X — formerly known as Twitter — previously saying Musk’s takeover coincided with a spike in “toxicity and hate” on the platform.

Using Australia’s groundbreaking Online Safety Act, the eSafety Commission has obtained a detailed breakdown of software engineers, content moderators and other safety staff working at X. 

Commissioner Julie Inman Grant, a former Twitter employee, said it was the first time these figures had been made public. 

They showed 1,213 specialist “trust and safety staff”, including contractors, had left X since it was acquired by Musk in October 2022. 

This included 80 percent of the software engineers focussed on “trust and safety issues”, said Inman Grant.

“To take 80 percent of these specialist engineers away, it would be like Volvo — known for its safety standards — eradicating all of their designers or engineers,” she told AFP. 

“You’ve got a perfect storm. You’re drastically decreasing your defences, and you’re introducing repeat offenders back onto the platform.” 

Australia has spearheaded the global push to regulate social media, forcing tech companies to outline how they are tackling issues such as hate speech and child sexual abuse. 

But attempts to exercise these powers have occasionally been met with indifference. 

In October last year, the eSafety Commission slapped X with an Aus$610,500 (US$388,000) fine, saying it had failed to show how it was cracking down on child pornography. 

But X ignored the deadline to pay the fine, before launching ongoing legal action to have it overturned. 

X did not reply to AFP’s request for comment, instead sending an automated response that read “busy now, please check back later”.

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Following the recent news of the New York Times’ lawsuit against OpenAI and Microsoft for copyright infringement (as reported by Digital Journal), the issue of ethics and artificial intelligence has come to the fore.

For example, a recent Forbes Advisor’s recent report highlights the innovation, adoption, ethics, and future of AI in education. The report is titled “Artificial Intelligence In Education: Teachers’ Opinions On AI In The Classroom.”

The report looks at the role of AI in teaching. Survey data finds that over 1 in 4 educators believe AI will play a central role in education over the next decade. With the widespread integration of artificial intelligence in classrooms, my team conducted a data analysis to explore AI adoption rates and educators’ perspectives on the impact of technology in education.

In terms of the firms of artificial intelligence, then AI-powered educational games are the most common AI-based tool in education, following adaptive learning platforms, automated grading and feedback systems, and chatbots.

However, not everything is positive and nearly 1 in 5 educators report that AI has hindered educational outcomes in the teaching and learning process. Furthermore, there were concerns about the ethical framework surrounding AI. With this, nearly all educators, a very high level, at 98 percent, expressed the need for some level of education on the ethical usage of AI.

Machines, tools and software have made many learning related tasks easier for many for years. However, thought needs to be given if we about to outsource large chunks of learning and education to artificial intelligence?

The biggest ethical concern is with unauthorised coping of text. This leads to 65 percent of educators believe plagiarism in essays and work is the most common concern about AI in education. Plagiarism is the act of using someone else’s work without proper attribution or permission. This includes not only text, but also ideas, images, and other forms of creative expression, and the use of Large Language Models can lead to intended and unintended copying of another person’s text.

It follows that the majority of reported AI-related cheating in educational institutions involves the use of AI-powered essay generators, accounting for 64 percent of reported instances.

This connects back to the lawsuit from the New York Times, which alleges that OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Microsoft’s Bing Chat have unlawfully leveraged content from The New York Times to train their AI systems.

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Triplebar CEO Maria Cho will join three other prominent food tech experts and the Deputy Under Secretary of the USDA for a panel during the world’s largest tech summit, CES 2024, where over 130,000 attendees and 3,500 exhibitors will be present this year in Las Vegas from Jan. 9-12.

Cho, a workplace diversity champion and a business development leader with over $1 billion in sales, will share the stage with The Spoon Editor Michael Wolf, who will moderate the panel discussion entitled Science Fiction on Our Plates.

At the core of the discussion, panel participants will cover topics such as gene editing and other tools that are ushering in a new era where food is more resilient, nutritious, and sustainable while also reducing its carbon footprint.

The panel members

Wolf is the creator of the Smart Kitchen Summit (SKS), The Food AI Summit, and The Spoon’s publisher. He put SKS together in 2015 because he saw how new disruptive technologies would reinvent the food system over the next decade.

“We’re a few weeks out from CES, and one of the panels I’m excited about is Science Fiction on our Plate, a conversation exploring new technologies and methods for creating food!” Wolf recently posted on LinkedIn.

US Department of Agriculture (USDA) Deputy Under Secretary Sanah Baig will sit alongside Cho. Baig has served USDA across the Barack Obama and Joseph Biden Presidential administrations.

In 2022, she was appointed USDA Deputy Under Secretary for Research, Education, and Economics. There, she leads a $4B+ science, tech, and innovation enterprise responsible for ensuring the success of U.S. agriculture. 

The panel also showcases Air Protein CEO and Founder Lysa Dyson. Dr. Dyson explains that her company is an innovative food company. It is the pioneer in making protein from elements of the air with its carbon-negative AirFermentation technology that produces delicious, nutritious, protein-rich food without arable land or harming the planet.

The panel discussion

Maria Cho shared some details regarding topics she and her panel colleagues will discuss during their Science Fiction Food on our Plate presentation.

“One vital topic to be discussed is how the biotech sector is aligning itself with regulatory agencies and product developers to bring nutritious and sustainable foods to market,” Cho said.

One of Triplebar’s greatest breakthroughs is understanding that animal cells like to grow in animals and not in big bioreactor tanks. “What we have succeeded in doing is evolving those animal cells so that they have the properties we need them to have so we can grow them in tanks,” she explained.

“Our ultimate goal is to transform humanity and help it transition from the industrial era to the biology age,” she said. “We are leveraging biology through biotech to directly impact how we feed and heal people and our planet.”

Maria Cho explained her company is innovating a part of the value chain in the bioeconomy by accelerating evolution to allow us to use biological systems, like microbes and cell lines, to fight the impact of climate change on food scarcity and bring abundance to the global food system.

The post Triplebar CEO Maria Cho takes the stage at CES 2024, the world’s top tech summit appeared first on Digital Journal.

Fujitsu created the Horizon IT system that resulted in some 700 local post office managers being wrongly convicted for theft and false accounting between 1999 and 2005.

The UK government, which plans to exonerate all victims, has warned the company will be “held to account” if a public inquiry finds it guilty of wrongdoing.

MPs are calling for billions of dollars of government contracts with Fujitsu to be re-examined amid public outrage over the scandal, ignited by a hit TV drama aired last week.

Lawmakers are due to grill Fujitsu bosses next week when they are hauled in front of the UK parliament select committee that scrutinises the spending of the government’s business department.

“We’re determined to uncover whether Fujitsu put profit before people,” the business committee’s chair, Labour MP Liam Byrne, told AFP.

“Someone must have known things were not right while innocent lives were being ruined by evidence that was simply unsafe.

“So we’ve got to know who at Fujitsu knew what when, and crucially did they raise warnings, or keep the truth to themselves,” he added.

A spokesperson for Fujitsu told AFP the company is “fully committed to supporting the inquiry in order to understand what happened and to learn from it”.

They added that Fujitsu “has apologised for its role” in the subpostmasters’ suffering.

– Lives lost –

The state-owned Post Office began installing Horizon IT in the late 1990s but flaws in its programming showed that money had gone missing from the subpostmasters’ branch accounts when it had not.

Postal service executives, refusing to acknowledge problems with the software, forced workers to repay the shortfalls.

The false accusations resulted in some managers being jailed, going bankrupt, losing their homes and their health.

Four people took their own lives and dozens of those since exonerated died without seeing their names cleared.

The High Court of England and Wales in 2019 ruled that it had been computer errors, not criminality, that had been behind the missing money.

The UK government announced Wednesday that it would unilaterally quash all convictions and offer £600,000 ($764,000) per head in upfront compensation.

The government has already in recent years paid almost £150 million to over 2,500 total victims embroiled in the scandal.

An independent public inquiry established in 2021 has yet to conclude who at the Post Office, or Fujitsu, knew what and when.

Government ministers have suggested that Fujitsu should cover some of the payouts if it is found culpable.

– Other contracts –

“We strongly believe that individuals, that businesses, will be held to account for one of the biggest miscarriages of justice this country has ever seen,” Prime Minister Rishi Sunak’s spokesman said Wednesday.

“We will not resile from that. But it is right that we allow an independent inquiry to get the facts, to set them out, and then we can act,” he added.

Fujitsu — which has headquarters in Tokyo — is one of the world’s largest IT services providers, with annual revenues of around $27 billion.

It provides IT services to multiple UK government departments including the interior, foreign, and environment ministries.

The firm has won 197 contracts from the British government since 2012, worth a total of $6.8 billion, according to data compiled by analysts at Tussell, which tracks government spending.

That includes the nearly £2.4 billion contract for the Horizon system itself, plus several agreements worth a combined £1 billion with the revenues and customs department.

Fujitsu also has a dozen contracts with the Ministry of Defence worth $582 million, according to Tussell.

The IT company received its most recent contract from the UK government as recently as last month, the Tussell data shows.

Conservative MP Mark Francois told parliament the government should review all of its contracts with Fujitsu and “should consider suspending” them if the company “won’t do the right thing”.

“Those are conversations we should have when we’ve identified exactly who is responsible,” said business minister Kevin Hollinrake in reply.

“We won’t be able to do that for some months yet but we’re keen to do it as soon as we possibly can.”

The post Japan tech firm Fujitsu in firing line over UK Post Office scandal appeared first on Digital Journal.

AirDrop allows users to send content to Apple devices in close proximity without an internet connection, encoded so they cannot be viewed by other people.

The service was widely used by participants in pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in 2019 that China’s central government eventually quelled.

Apple also limited file-sharing for Chinese iPhone users in 2022 following protests against the ruling Communist Party’s stringent zero-Covid policy.

The Beijing municipal government’s justice bureau said experts at the Beijing Wangshen Dongjian Justice Appraisal Institute in the capital had devised a way to reveal an iPhone’s encrypted device log.

From there, they could identify an AirDrop user’s phone number and email accounts, the Monday statement on the bureau’s website said.

It said the technique “cracked the tough technological problem of the transmission of inappropriate information with anonymous traceability via AirDrop”.

The method also “raised the efficacy and accuracy of case detection and resolution, and has effectively helped police ascertain several case suspects”.

The statement did not mention whether the technique had led to any arrests or convictions.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment from AFP.

– Protest leaflets –

There were widespread reports in late 2022 that people in China were using AirDrop to spread digital leaflets critical of the government.

The transmissions were believed to be partly inspired by a protest in Beijing in which a man hung banners calling for the removal of President Xi Jinping.

In November of that year, Apple released an AirDrop update that meant users of Apple smartphones in China could only opt-in to receive files from unknown contacts during a 10-minute window before it automatically shuts off. The feature did not previously have a time limit.

The update made it virtually impossible to receive unexpected files from strangers.

Chinese authorities have for years used extensive digital surveillance methods to silence dissent, with most domestic social media apps requiring users to register using their real names.

People must provide proof of identification to purchase SIM cards or install home broadband connections.

Platforms such as Weibo employ thousands of content moderators and automatically block politically sensitive keywords, such as tennis star Peng Shuai’s name after she accused a senior politician of sexual assault in 2021.

Apple has long faced criticism for making perceived concessions to Xi’s increasingly repressive China.

The company in 2019 removed a Hong Kong map application used by pro-democracy protesters, saying it endangered police, after China warned the tech giant to drop the app.

Apple CEO Tim Cook defended the move at the time, saying the firm had received “credible information” that the app was being used to target individual police officers.

In 2020, Beijing imposed a sweeping national security law on Hong Kong that has all but quashed public dissent in the former British colony.

The post China says state-backed experts crack Apple’s AirDrop appeared first on Digital Journal.

AirDrop allows users to send content to Apple devices in close proximity without an internet connection, encoded so they cannot be viewed by other people.

The service was widely used by participants in pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong in 2019 that China’s central government eventually quelled.

Apple also limited file-sharing for Chinese iPhone users in 2022 following protests against the ruling Communist Party’s stringent zero-Covid policy.

The Beijing municipal government’s justice bureau said experts at the Beijing Wangshen Dongjian Justice Appraisal Institute in the capital had devised a way to reveal an iPhone’s encrypted device log.

From there, they could identify an AirDrop user’s phone number and email accounts, the Monday statement on the bureau’s website said.

It said the technique “cracked the tough technological problem of the transmission of inappropriate information with anonymous traceability via AirDrop”.

The method also “raised the efficacy and accuracy of case detection and resolution, and has effectively helped police ascertain several case suspects”.

The statement did not mention whether the technique had led to any arrests or convictions.

Apple did not immediately respond to a request for comment from AFP.

There were widespread reports in late 2022 that people in China were using AirDrop to spread digital leaflets critical of the government.

The transmissions were believed to be partly inspired by a protest in Beijing in which a man hung banners calling for the removal of President Xi Jinping.

In November of that year, Apple released an AirDrop update that meant users of Apple smartphones in China could only opt-in to receive files from unknown contacts during a 10-minute window before it automatically shuts off. The feature did not previously have a time limit.

The update made it virtually impossible to receive unexpected files from strangers.

Apple has long faced criticism for making perceived concessions to Xi’s increasingly repressive China.

Beijing imposed a sweeping national security law in Hong Kong in 2020 that has all but quashed public dissent in the former British colony.

The post China says state-backed experts crack Apple’s AirDrop appeared first on Digital Journal.

But behind their cute facade, these robots are all sensors and engineering, and designed to perform the drudgery of logistical support in hospitals or hotels.

“Why live with ugly machines,” says Jerome Monceaux, head of Paris-based start-up Enchanted Tools, who was on hand to present the pair at the CES tech show in Las Vegas.

“I could cut their heads off and erase their colors, but I’m not sure you’d want to share your daily life with them,” he continues.

A number of start-ups are working on robots that look familiar and help humans, without making them feel uncomfortable or unsafe.

Amazon is currently testing Agility’s “Digit”, a two-legged android that wouldn’t look out of place in Star Wars, to carry plastic bins in its warehouses.

Enchanted Tools has also bet on team-playing robots, designed to relieve staff of repetitive tasks.

But in addition to helping out, Miroki is meant to bring a touch of “wonder” to the workplace.

“It’s a way of celebrating something very beautiful in ourselves and avoid becoming machines ourselves,” said Monceaux.

His company hopes to produce 100,000 robots over the next 10 years.

– Filling jobs –

Every CES brings its share of companion robots and androids, but they haven’t gained much ground in homes and businesses.

At the same time, “labor shortage has been the number one problem since Covid across different industries. Today, we have roughly 18 million job vacancies,” said Joe Lui, the global lead on robotics at Accenture.

And while some tasks have been adapted for mechanical arms and autonomous forklifts, many others require language, mobility and understanding of the environment and therefore humans.

Or humanoids infused with artificial intelligence, said Lui, who thinks AI can bring robots into everyday life.

“Humanoids are going to be really like coworkers in the coming years and natural language interfaces like ChatGPT are going to be prevalent,” said Chris Nielsen, head of Levatas, a US company that has integrated generative AI software into Spot, a quadruped robot from Boston Dynamics.

Thanks to generative AI, robots depend less on pre-written scripts.

But “don’t worry, robots like us are designed to help humans make their lives better,” robot Moxie told AFP.

“We always follow the instructions and programs that humans give us. So you have the control.”

As tall as a teddy bear and doped with generative AI, Moxie is capable of interacting with children, telling them stories, giving math lessons and performing dance moves with two arms.

“Moxie isn’t here to replace anyone. Moxie is a mentor, tutor and a friend,” said Daniel Thorpe of Embodied, the company that created the robot.

– ‘Frightening’ –

Two-legged, mobile and autonomous humanoids still have a long way to go before they leave the laboratory.

But some of their precursors have at least made it out of CES, like Moxie or Aura, a highly anthropomorphic robot that entertains patrons at The Sphere, Las Vegas’ new  concert venue.

“I receive  a lot of questions like how old are you, what’s the meaning of life, who’s going to win the Super Bowl?” said Aura to curious viewers.

Aura punctuates her answers with jokes, exaggerated laughter and even rolls her shoulders into a shrug.

For Monceaux, highly anthropomorphic robots risk “provoking an epidermic reaction. They create confusion between our humanity and their robot nature, and are frightening.”

“Nobody wants to have one in their home or hospital on a daily basis,” he said.

Above all, he added, “it creates an expectation of behavior similar to our own”, and therefore a risk of disappointment, because the robot doesn’t see and understand the world as we do, and won’t for years to come.”

For Jonathan Hurst, co-founder of Agility, its Digit robot would look strange without a head and creep out humans.

“We had a lot of conversation about that internally at the company” and the head was kept even if it provided no significant technical purpose.

At CES, Adam, a robot barista from Richtech Robotics, serves coffee to delighted attendees and can now make jokes, thanks to generative AI.

But to refill the coffee machine with milk, he still needs humans.

The post At CES tech show, seeking robots neither too human nor too machine appeared first on Digital Journal.

Experts and Taiwanese officials say this campaign is linked to Beijing, which has made no secret of its disapproval of frontrunner Lai Ching-te, whose Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) rejects the Chinese claim that Taiwan is its territory.

Often accompanied by loud graphics and dramatic music, some of these TikTok videos originated on Douyin, the version of the app available in mainland China, an AFP Fact Check investigation found.

One Chinese hashtag mocking Lai got more than 8.5 million views, and the responses to posts and videos against the DPP were replete with derogatory comments and conspiracy theories.

“She’s a foreigner,” commented one TikTok user on a video featuring DPP opponents loudly claiming Lai’s running mate Hsiao Bi-khim was secretly a US citizen — and thus ineligible.

Hsiao has repeatedly said she gave up her US citizenship years ago, and AFP found her name on a US government list of people who have renounced their nationality.

Still, the unfounded claim about Hsiao’s US citizenship has been the most persistent social media allegation during the election campaign.

Experts say it illustrates a Beijing-linked push to use disinformation or partially true claims to discredit any politicians who do not accept Taiwan as a part of China.

Beijing has ramped up military pressure on Taiwan in recent years, but analysts say it is also attempting to sway public opinion away from pro-independence views.

“(China-led) information campaigns are sustained, systematic and produce huge volumes of misinformation — anything to discredit… the legitimacy of Taiwan’s democracy,” Jonathan Sullivan of the University of Nottingham, told AFP.

“Taiwan faces an extremely well-resourced and motivated rival for ‘hearts and minds’.”

Beijing has dismissed the allegations as “rumours and hype”.

– China vs the DPP –

Starting as early as May 2022, accounts posing as Taiwanese users began disseminating videos and political memes in a “sustained and coordinated effort”, the US research firm Graphika said in a recent report.

Lai has accused China of using “all means to interfere with this election”, including disinformation.

China has long opposed the DPP, whose Tsai Ing-wen became president in 2016. She considers Taiwan a sovereign state and does not accept China’s claim.

With the DPP candidate the frontrunner, China has framed the vote as a choice between war and peace.

It is a theme echoed in much of the disinformation or misleading content identified by AFP, other fact-checking organisations and Taiwanese authorities: the DPP is acting against Taiwan and at the behest of the ill-intentioned United States.

While many of these videos include straightforward stitching together of commentary by DPP opponents, some now feature deepfakes.

One such fraudulent video emerged in November, showing Lai speaking to the press with the audio noticeably altered to make it sound like he was praising his party’s Beijing-friendly opponents.

Taiwanese authorities swiftly took it down and described it as an attempt to influence voters.

– From Douyin to TikTok –

An AFP Fact-Check investigation found four anti-DPP videos that first appeared on Douyin, followed by multiple clones on TikTok with hundreds of thousands of views.

One video featuring footage of people criticising Lai over a railway project appeared on Douyin on December 19 and then landed on TikTok the same day, timestamps collected by AFP showed.

Another indication that the videos first appeared on Douyin is the use of simplified Chinese characters in captions.

While mainland China uses those characters, Taiwan uses the traditional script.

The videos were viewed by a far larger audience on TikTok.

One got nearly 20 times more views on the platform than Douyin, according to AFP Fact Check.

“These messages and videos often come from China, and most of the content is about distrust of some government policies,” Charles Yeh, founder of the fact-checking group MyGoPen, told AFP. 

AFP, along with more than a dozen fact-checking organisations, is paid by TikTok to verify videos that potentially contain false information. 

TikTok then removes some videos if the information is shown to be false by AFP teams, or flags them as misleading to users on the platform.

The post Taiwan voters face flood of pro-China disinformation appeared first on Digital Journal.

Each one costs £3,000 (nearly $4,000) and is dedicated to one thing — training students to play video games at the highest level.

The new kit is part of a new eSports campus that has recently opened in the city of Sunderland, with the aim of boosting the country’s virtual sports sector.

Dave Martin, chief operating officer at the British Esports Federation, said there was “incredible talent” in the country.

But he believes more could be done, particularly as other countries are further ahead.

– Popularity –

Esports –- professional level competitive gaming –- is booming in popularity and officially became recognised as a sport by the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 2017.

The global market is worth more than $1.8 billion, according to a report by Nielsen and specialised foundation ex corp. published in August.

That is still less than one percent of the entire video games market, which is worth more than £237 billion worldwide.

But the esports sector is growing fast.

It tripled in size worldwide between 2017 and 2022 and is projected to grow by another 50 percent by 2026.

In the UK, the esports market was valued at over $69 million in 2022, far behind industry giants like China ($594 million) and the United States ($440 million), the report said.

In an effort to catch up, the British Esports Federation has invested £7.0 million into Sunderland’s National Esports Performance Campus (NEPC).

Martin says he hopes it will “enhance the UK esports ecosystem from grassroots upwards”.

The federation already provides training for a range of gaming industry professions, including marketing, competition broadcasting, team management and pro-gaming itself.

– Olympics –

The new NEPC will not exclusively focus on training prospective players.

It will also educate other future industry professionals via a partnership with Sunderland College, a local higher education institution whose premises it shares. 

“The esports industry is comprised of lots of different professions,” explained Toby Bowery, leader of the Sunderland College esports programme. 

“There’s the events management side of things, the business side of things. There’s the creative media side of things. Then you’ve got the sports side of things” with players, psychologists and nutritionists, he added.

Bowery described the facility as a “real work environment” shared with the British Esports Federation, enabling students to meet pro-players.

Prize pools in virtual sports are now exceeding traditional sports.

Each of the five-member team that won 2021’s “The International” — a showpiece tournament hosted annually for esports giant DOTA 2 — took home more than $3.6 million.

In comparison, that year’s Wimbledon men’s tennis champion, Novak Djokovic, won $2.2 million.

In September 2023, the IOC announced the creation of a separate commission dedicated to esports, to develop virtual sports as an Olympic staple.

Sunderland’s new campus will soon complete construction of “The Arena”, a complex designed to host esports tournaments. 

– ‘Quite surreal’ –

Nicholas Wilkinson, a student on the college’s esports programme, called the development of an esports campus in northeast England “quite surreal”.

He hopes to start a career as a “caster” –- the esports equivalent of a professional commentator.

Previously, “every time you’d want to go to an esports event or anything to do for esports, you’d have to travel down south to London, to Nottingham,” Wilkinson said.

Another student on the course, Evan Howey, aims to become a pro-player. 

“Different people on the course have different interests,” he explained.

With students aiming to get into a variety of jobs in the sector, he said it would be good to encourage collaboration, to help growth.

The new campus is also a gateway for “students with underprivileged backgrounds that may not be able to have access to this equipment at all at home”, added Chris Jeffrey, an independent game developer and esports coach.

The post Game on: UK campus looks to turbocharge esports appeared first on Digital Journal.