“AI – Artificial Intelligence”

Advances in artificial intelligence have allowed software to recreate voices with eerie precision. The technology puts voice actors, often-nameless professionals, in a precarious position.

Companies clamor to use Remie Michelle Clarke’s voice. An award-winning vocal artist, her smooth, Irish accent backs ads for Mazda and Mastercard and is the sound of Microsoft’s search engine, Bing, in Ireland.

But in January, her sound engineer told Michelle Clarke he’d found a voice that sounded uncannily like hers someplace unexpected: on Revoicer.com, credited to a woman named “Olivia.” For a modest monthly fee, Revoicer customers can access hundreds of different voices and, through an artificial intelligence-backed tool, morph them to say anything — to voice commercials, recite corporate trainings or narrate books.

Well that’s another “profession” surrendering to AI. There will be “voice appropriation” lawsuits for awhile but the damage is done short of a ban.

As the world starts to push the boundaries and usage of AI systems, there is a corresponding rise in AI-created accidents, near misses and even death. Such incidents, ranging from self-driving car accidents to chat systems creating racist content, are set to increase rapidly, according to experts tracking AI problems.

Computer-generated sermons may be only the start of the tech influence on religion.

Elon Musk offered a chilling prediction about the future of artificial intelligence (AI) during his recent interview with Tucker Carlson: “AI is more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or production maintenance or bad car production, in the sense that it is, it has the potential — however small one may regard that probability, but it is non-trivial — it has the potential of civilization destruction.”

I saw the future in Bangkok’s departure lounge

There are many things to be learnt from visiting an airport. A trip to Stansted Airport, for instance, will teach you that Stansted is a really dim place to locate an airport. Meanwhile, JFK in New York City will inform you that America is becoming seriously pricey for European tourists.

But a recent trip to Bangkok airport taught me something more profound. There I was, supping some pleasant Singapore Laksa, and I saw this thing hove into view. It was an autonomous robot cleaner, busily keeping all the shiny floors of Suvarnabhumi airport in pristine condition.

An Indian media group unveiled its first full-time artificial intelligence (AI) news anchor this month — a bot named Sana who presents news updates several times a day.

The AI-powered reporter appears on the India Today Group’s Aaj Tak news channel.

“She is bright, gorgeous, ageless, tireless,” said the group’s vice chairperson, Kalli Purie, at a launch event attended by Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi.

The winner of a major photography award has refused his prize after revealing his work was in fact an AI creation.

German artist Boris Eldagsen’s entry, entitled Pseudomnesia: The Electrician, won the creative open category at last week’s Sony World Photography Award.

Google’s CEO says they don’t “fully understand” their own AI system after it figured out how to do things on its own

Our enslavement to idolatry will end in disaster

Idolatry is intrinsically paradoxical. Although it enslaves humans to undisciplined desires and pleasing falsehoods, it springs from the will to mastery. It’s essential that the Golden Calf can’t talk, let alone make mountains smoke and skies thunder, as God does at Sinai. It was built to justify self-indulgence, not restrict it.

Isabella is throwing a party and decides to ask her friend Maria to help put up decorations. Maria agrees and sees an opportunity — she invites Klaus, her secret crush, to come along.
It’s an everyday sequence of events, except that Isabella, Maria and Klaus exist only in an AI-powered simulation of a small-town community.

The UK has become the first country in Europe to approve a hands-free driving car for use on motorways.

Ford has been granted permission to launch its BlueCruise system which allows “hands-off, eyes-on driving” on the 2,300-mile motorway network in England, Scotland and Wales.

After a couple of years in the doghouse, the policing technology nicknamed Digidog is returning to the mean streets of New York. Withdrawn by former New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio in 2021 after protests by civil liberties groups, the four-legged robotic friend, made by Boston Dynamics, is being brought back by current Mayor Eric Adams, alongside a Knightscope K5 security robot and a device that fires a GPS tracker onto a fleeing vehicle.

Silicon Valley heavyweights clash over the risks of super-powerful AI

For a moment the internet was fooled. An image of Pope Francis in a gleaming white, papal puffer jacket spread like wildfire across the web.

Yet the likeness of the unusually dapper 86-year-old head of the Vatican was a fake. The phoney picture had been created as a joke using artificial intelligence technology, but was realistic enough to trick the untrained eye.

California legislators and their union allies are pushing a bill that would preemptively ban the use of autonomous trucks on California’s roads that don’t have a human safety operator.

Working its way through the Legislature is A.B. 316, which would require that vehicles weighing 10,001 pounds or more have a human in the cab.

Sponsored by Assemblymember Cecilia Aguiar-Curry (D–Winters), the bill has the enthusiastic support of unionized truck drivers who are explicit about their desire to protect jobs as well as public safety.

Everyone seems to be worried about the potential impact of artificial intelligence (AI) these days. Even technology leaders including Elon Musk and the Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak have signed a public petition urging OpenAI, the makers of the conversational chatbot ChatGPT, to suspend development for six months so it can be “rigorously audited and overseen by independent outside experts”.