It's the new badge of celebrity status that nobody wants. Jennifer Aniston, Oprah Winfrey and Kylie Jenner have all had their voices cloned by fraudsters. Online blaggers used artificial intelligence to fake the Tiggerish tones of Martin Lewis, the TV financial adviser. And this weekend David Attenborough described himself as "profoundly disturbed" to have discovered that his cloned voice had been used to deliver partisan US news bulletins. Now experts have warned that voice-cloning is outpacing the law as technologists hone previously clunky voice generators into models capable of emulating the subtlest pauses and breathing of human intonation.

Amazon's virtual assistant Alexa has been accused of sexism after being unable to respond to a question about the Lionesses' World Cup semi-final. British academic Dr Joanne Rodda asked Alexa for the result of Wednesday's match against Australia, which England won 3-1. But the supposedly'smart' technology didn't even know the match had taken place as it was only familiar with the men's game, the BBC reports. Astonishingly, when Dr Rodda asked'for the result of the England-Australia football match', Alexa said there was no such match. Amazon admitted the mistake was due to an'error' – although it didn't specify the cause – and that Alexa will get better at learning over time.

Amazon has revealed a huge change that will make interacting with its smart speakers a lot less fun. The tech giant is retiring all three celebrity voices for its smart speakers – Samuel L. Jackson, Shaquille O'Neal and Melissa McCarthy. Amazon offered the superstar voices for $4.99 each as an alternative to Alexa, but these are no longer available for purchase on its website. Amazon, which released its fifth generation Echo Dot smart speaker last year, said customers can contact them for a refund. The feature was for US users only, although the tech giant does offer alternative voices for its smart assistant in the UK, such as Santa Claus.

With the rise of AI language models and tools like ChatGPT and Bard, we've heard warnings from people involved, like Elon Musk, about the risks posed by AI. Now, a group of high-profile industry leaders has issued a one-sentence statement: "Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war." It was posted to the Center for AI Safety, an organization with the mission "to reduce societal-scale risks from artificial intelligence," according to its website. Signatories include OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman and Google DeepMind head Demis Hassabis. Turing Award-winning researchers Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio, the godfathers of modern AI, also put their names to it.

If you've been saving up to integrate Shaq's voice into your Alexa devices, you've officially blown it. Amazon is ditching all of its Alexa-enabled celebrity voices, including Shaquille O'Neal, Melissa McCarthy and, say it ain't so, Samuel L. Jackson. The distinct voice options will no longer be available for purchase and will no longer function even if you made a purchase a while back, as reported by The Verge. That brings us to the topic of refunds, and it looks like there won't be any. This isn't earth-shattering news, as the voice options launched for just $1 before moving up to $5 in recent months.

If you've been saving up to integrate Shaq's voice into your Alexa devices, you've officially blown it. Amazon is ditching all of its Alexa-enabled celebrity voices, including Shaquille O'Neal, Melissa McCarthy and, say it ain't so, Samuel L. Jackson. The distinct voice options will no longer be available for purchase and will no longer function even if you made a purchase a while back, as reported by The Verge. That brings us to the topic of refunds, and it looks like there won't be any. This isn't earth-shattering news, as the voice options launched for just $1 before moving up to $5 in recent months.

Our reverence towards stars and celebrities was not borne of the 19th century's cinematic revolution, but rather has been a resilient aspect of our culture for millennia. Ancient tales of immortal gods rising again and again after fatal injury, the veneration and deification of social and political leaders, Madame Tussauds' wax museums and the Academy Awards' annual In Memoriam segment, they're are all facets of the human compulsion to put well-known thought leaders, tastemakers and trendsetters up on pedestals. And with a new, startlingly lifelike generation of generative artificial intelligence (gen-AI) at our disposal, today's celebrities could potentially remain with us long after their natural deaths. American Historian Daniel Boorstin once quipped, "to be famous is to be well known for being well-known." With the rise of social media, achieving celebrity is now easier than ever, for better or worse.

Meme-makers and misinformation peddlers are embracing artificial intelligence tools to create convincing fake videos on the cheap. It wouldn't be completely out of character for Joe Rogan, the comedian turned podcaster, to endorse a "libido-boosting" coffee brand for men. But when a video circulating on TikTok recently showed Mr. Rogan and his guest, Andrew Huberman, hawking the coffee, some eagle-eyed viewers were shocked -- including Dr. Huberman. "Yep that's fake," Dr. Huberman wrote on Twitter after seeing the ad, in which he appears to praise the coffee's testosterone-boosting potential, even though he never did. The ad was one of a growing number of fake videos on social media made with technology powered by artificial intelligence. Experts said Mr. Rogan's voice appeared to have been synthesized using A.I. tools that mimic celebrity voices.

AI models designed to closely simulate a person's voice are making it easier for bad actors to mimic loved ones and scam vulnerable people out of thousands of dollars, The Washington Post reported. Quickly evolving in sophistication, some AI voice-generating software requires just a few sentences of audio to convincingly produce speech that conveys the sound and emotional tone of a speaker's voice, while other options need as little as three seconds. For those targeted--which is often the elderly, the Post reported--it can be increasingly difficult to detect when a voice is inauthentic, even when the emergency circumstances described by scammers seem implausible. Tech advancements seemingly make it easier to prey on people's worst fears and spook victims who told the Post they felt "visceral horror" hearing what sounded like direct pleas from friends or family members in dire need of help. One couple sent $15,000 through a bitcoin terminal to a scammer after believing they had spoken to their son.

A new chatbot, similar to ChatGPT, is able to turn text into celebrity voices, creating "deepfakes" in the style of Morgan Freedman, Jordan Peterson, Donald Trump and many more. NoiseGPT can even be trained by users to imitate their own voice, or that of their friends, family members or work colleagues. Imagine getting a happy birthday voice-message from your favourite US president, or a voice from beyond the grave in the form of John Lennon or Elvis sharing some personal information with you, that only your closest relatives know about. This is the selling point of the newest chatbot application to be released following the much-hyped launch of Microsoft-backed (MSFT) ChatGPT artificial intelligence content generator in November 2022. NoiseGPT's chief operational officer Frankie Peartree told Yahoo Finance UK: "We are training the AI to mimic around 25 celebrity voices at the moment, and will soon have 100 plus celebrity voices to offer."