The mysterious singer with millions of streams - but who (or what) is she? Sienna Rose is having a good month. Three of her dusky, jazz-infused soul songs are in Spotify's Viral Top 50. The most popular, a dreamy ballad called Into The Blue, has been played more than five million times. If she continues on this trajectory, Rose could become one of the year's hottest new stars.

Brit Award-winning singer Jorja Smith's record label has said it wants a share of the royalties for a song it claims was created using an artificial intelligence clone of the singer's voice. I Run by British dance act Haven went viral on TiKTok in October thanks, in part, to smooth soul vocals by an uncredited female singer. Although I Run has now been re-released with new vocals, Smith's label FAMM said it believes the track was made with AI trained on her work, and is seeking compensation. It's bigger than one artist or one song, FAMM wrote in a statement on Instagram . The label said it believes both versions of the track infringe on Jorja's rights and unfairly take advantage of the work of all the songwriters with whom she collaborates.

When Synthesia launched in 2017, its primary purpose was to match AI versions of real human faces--for example, the former footballer David Beckham--with dubbed voices speaking in different languages. A few years later, in 2020, it started giving the companies that signed up for its services the opportunity to make professional-level presentation videos starring either AI versions of staff members or consenting actors. The avatars' body movements could be jerky and unnatural, their accents sometimes slipped, and the emotions indicated by their voices didn't always match their facial expressions. Now Synthesia's avatars have been updated with more natural mannerisms and movements, as well as expressive voices that better preserve the speaker's accent--making them appear more humanlike than ever before. For Synthesia's corporate clients, these avatars will make for slicker presenters of financial results, internal communications, or staff training videos.

ScotRail is set to replace a controversial AI voice on trains, after criticism from a professional voiceover artist. Gayanne Potter's Scottish accent was used to teach station announcer "Iona", but she said it was a surprise to hear a "dreadful" robotic version of herself. ScotRail introduced the voice in May, provide by Swedish tech firm ReadSpeaker, to replace pre-recorded human announcements on some services. Transport Scotland said the rail operator now intended to introduce an alternative voice "as soon as practicable". ScotRail has not confirmed if this will be a human recording or another AI-trained voice.

Feedback is New Scientist's popular sideways look at the latest science and technology news. You can submit items you believe may amuse readers to Feedback by emailing feedback@newscientist.com Now and then, Feedback sees ads for courses promising to teach us how to become an excellent creative writer. It sounds like fun, but why learn to be a good writer when we can just do this stuff instead? One brand that recently caught Feedback's eye is BBC Maestro.

Every few years, Hany Farid and his wife have the grim but necessary conversation about their end-of-life plans. They hope to have many more decades together--Farid is 58, and his wife is 38--but they want to make sure they have their affairs in order when the time comes. In addition to discussing burial requests and financial decisions, Farid has recently broached an eerier topic: If he dies first, would his wife want to digitally resurrect him as an AI clone? Farid, an AI expert at UC Berkeley, knows better than most that physical death and digital death are two different things. "My wife has my voice, my likeness, and a lot of my writings," he told me. "She could very easily train a large language model to be an interactive version of me."

This study explores the impact of AI-generated digital self-clones on improving online presentation skills. We carried out a mixed-design experiment involving 44 international students, comparing self-recorded videos (control) with self-clone videos (AI group) for English presentation practice. The AI videos utilized voice cloning, face swapping, lip-sync, and body-language simulation to refine participants' original presentations in terms of repetition, filler words, and pronunciation. Machine-rated scores indicated enhancements in speech performance for both groups. Though the groups didn't significantly differ, the AI group exhibited a heightened depth of reflection, self-compassion, and a meaningful transition from a corrective to an enhancive approach to self-critique. Within the AI group, congruence between self-perception and AI self-clones resulted in diminished speech anxiety and increased enjoyment. Our findings recommend the ethical employment of digital self-clones to enhance the emotional and cognitive facets of skill development.

OnlyFans star, Amouranth, is hiring out a virtual AI clone to fans so they can live out their'wildest fantasies' with her. Artificial intelligence (AI) has been used to make a copy of 29-year-old Amouranth, whose real name is Kaitlyn Siragusa, as a way of getting closer to her 6.4million followers. The chatbot girlfriend offers to take you on a'thrilling journey of connection and intimacy' - for a hefty price of $1 (80p) per minute. But if users want to take it further and receive eerily lifelike voice messages from'Amouranth', there is another charge of $36 per hour (£29). 'I thrive on taking risks and pushing boundaries.

John Meyer, CEO and founder of Forever Voices, said that he created the company last year, after trying to use AI to develop ways to reconnect with his late father, who passed away in 2017. He built an AI voice chatbot that replicated his late father's voice and personality to talk to and found the experience incredibly healing. "It was a remarkable experience to talk to him again in a super realistic way," Meyer said. "I've been in tech my whole life, I'm a programmer, so it was easy for me to start building something like that especially as things got more advanced with the AI space."

As Rajan prepares for his second attempt to climb Mount Everest and wears his Oculus VR 108.1, he feels better prepared this time compared to his first climb two years ago. Having paid $20K to repair and upgrade his avatar from previous damages, he also had acquired the state of the art virtual gear recommended by the best AI Trainer available in the market -- The Nimbus 314 which he hired for $50K. With 80% of his biannual earnings invested in this attempt, Rajan feels he has left no stone unturned this time and he is all set to be the Everest climber 209,441 in the Metaverse 005 and will have rightfully earned the right to his first Everest summit peak flag NFT(whose current market value was going at $149K). However, as he rests in his rented NFT tent in the Everest Base camp, looking through his VR lens, he remembers his first failed attempt. It was the year 3008, and he had completed two years at his lucrative job as an AI Model for a top tech company specializing in building state-of-the-art AI avatars for humans and owner of one of the 5 most popular metaverses. As an employee, he was eligible for a 50% discount for his first avatar purchase which he utilized immediately by going for 14Trekker 89.0 avatar as he wanted to be an avid virtual trekker like his parents.