Poor governance, poor policy and decades of neoliberalism have broken Australia’s university sector, with devastating consequences for students and the country.

Hayder A. Dhahad, Iraq’s deputy minister for scientific research affairs, speaks at an awards ceremony at the country’s Science Day celebration. Source: Instagram In the string of prestigious…

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Apologies are a powerful tool used in human-human interactions to provide affective support, regulate social processes, and exchange information following a trust violation. The emerging field of AI apology investigates the use of apologies by artificially intelligent systems, with recent research suggesting how this tool may provide similar value in human-machine interactions. Until recently, contributions to this area were sparse, and these works have yet to be synthesised into a cohesive body of knowledge. This article provides the first synthesis and critical analysis of the state of AI apology research, focusing on studies published between 2020 and 2023. We derive a framework of attributes to describe five core elements of apology: outcome, interaction, offence, recipient, and offender. With this framework as the basis for our critique, we show how apologies can be used to recover from misalignment in human-AI interactions, and examine trends and inconsistencies within the field. Among the observations, we outline the importance of curating a human-aligned and cross-disciplinary perspective in this research, with consideration for improved system capabilities and long-term outcomes.

Recent studies have explored integrating Large Language Models (LLMs) with search engines to leverage both the LLMs' internal pre-trained knowledge and external information. Specially, reinforcement l...