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.

I can remember the days when indexing text meant compiling lists of pages on which a word appeared or finding pages in which "keywords" appeared in context. Then came full text search as exemplified by the Google search engine. Pages found in the World Wide Web are indexed word-by-word and the retrieved Web page references are rank ordered by an elaboration of the original "page rank" concept developed by the founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Large language models (LLMs) represent a very different way of performing information retrieval. I am no expert in this field but my cartoon model of the LLM notion follows: A statistical model of the relationship of "tokens" (words or phrases) to each other (for example, likelihood of appearing "near" each other) is built.

On the Antarctic research ship Sir David Attenborough, engineers are gathered around a 4-metre square opening in the hull, known as the moon pool. A white robot floats in the water, its headlights illuminating the sides of the pool. "Now push it forward and drop it to the bottom," says Jamie Neilson, an engineering supervisor at Seatronics, the maker of this remotely operated vehicle (ROV).

He has one of the most instantly recognisable voices in Britain, but have you ever wondered what David Attenborough would sound like speaking German? Well, now you can find out, thanks to a new AI tool that can clone anyone's voice and make them say anything in multiple languages. The tool, by ElevenLabs, requires just a few seconds of audio, and even maintains the speaker's original tone of voice. Creators hope this will'expand the horizons' in numerous fields including publishing, game development and the media. You can try it yourself on ElevenLabs' website using your own voice or that of your favourite celebrity!

Artificial Intelligence (AI) will enable ships navigating in polar ocean conditions to be more efficient using a new route planning tool created by British Antarctic Survey (BAS) researchers. The tool aims to reduce carbon emissions and optimize science. The system, being developed by the BAS AI Lab, will be used by the crew of the U.K.'s polar research ship RRS Sir David Attenborough to make decisions about route planning. It will recommend the fastest and most fuel-efficient routes between two locations taking into account all the polar conditions such as sea ice, ocean dynamics and weather. The Captain and officers, with their vast knowledge and experience of sailing around the icy continent, can evaluate the options provided and select the best route.

"When AI goes into the machine learning space, it opens up a range of issues such as biases and privacy," she says. "Boards have to be switched on to this and be able to ask the right questions." According to Williams, a significant proportion of the challenges caused by AI usage within companies comes from the fact that the technology is far from transparent. "Even the people who build it don't really know why it does what it does," she says. If it is successful in understanding AI, developing strategies for it, and integrating it into mainstream business strategy, the payoff is huge." Asked to nominate other technology-related issues occupying the minds board members, panel members pointed to a range including security and the ability to withstand cyber attacks. "Cyber security is really at the top of the list," says David Attenborough, managing director and chief executive at betting company Tabcorp. "This is because any company is under permanent attack from different directions and you need to be protecting your customers, your networks and your employees from those attacks." "The other major issue that keeps me awake at night is the resilience of networks because we have multiple systems supporting a massive retail network and a big digital network.

The world of AI has a lot of things around it to thank for its existence in our technological landscape of today. Not only have humans spent decades of research perfecting the mathematical calculations to make these wonderfully complex learning algorithms work but during this time we have looked further than our own species as inspiration to make the next generation of intelligent presence on our planet. Mother Nature, and all that it encompasses, has it's roots firmly planted in the workings of Artificial Intelligence -- and it's here to stay. They go into incredible, high definition detail about the behaviours and properties of the Earth's many inhabitants, and they allow us to understand how they fit into the natural ecosystem and work together in order to allow our planet to flourish -- to make it Earth. Now I'm no Sir David Attenborough, but I'm still going to take you on a wildlife documentary of my own.

Episode two of Blue Planet II could be one of Sir David Attenborough's scariest shows yet - giving us a glimpse of life in total darkness that we are only just starting to explore. The episode also looks at peculiar gardens that are thriving in the pitch black as well as species of coral that have never been seen in shallower waters. The fangtooth (pictured) has the largest teeth relative to body size for any fish in the entire ocean. The filming of Blue Planet involved around 1,000 people from producers to deep sea divers, researchers to scientists, camera crews to helicopter pilots and drone operators. Some 125 expeditions were undertaken across every ocean, with 1,500 days spent at sea and 6,000 hours underwater.

Sir David Attenborough is no stranger to VR. The beloved naturalist and TV presenter has worked on immersive, look-where-you-like films for the Natural History Museum (NHM) in London, the American Museum of Natural History and Google. Now, the documentarian is teaming up with Sky and the NHM for a new experience called Hold the World, which allows you to pick up fossils and other rate objects. As you turn them over, a "hologram" of Attenborough will pop up and explain their importance. Sky is working with VR and "immersive content production studio" Factory 42 on the project, as well as Dream Reality Interactive and Talesmith.