This paper critiques digital cloning in academic research, highlighting how it exemplifies AI solutionism. Digital clones, which replicate user data to simulate behavior, are often seen as scalable tools for behavioral insights. However, this framing obscures ethical concerns around consent, agency, and representation. Drawing on feminist theories of agency, the paper argues that digital cloning oversimplifies human complexity and risks perpetuating systemic biases. To address these issues, it proposes decentralized data repositories and dynamic consent models, promoting ethical, context-aware AI practices that challenge the reductionist logic of AI solutionism

Tupac Shakur's estate is none too happy about Drake cloning the late hip-hop legend's voice in a Kendrick Lamar diss track. Billboard reported Wednesday that attorney Howard King, representing Mr. Shakur's estate, sent a cease-and-desist letter calling Drake's use of Shakur's voice "a flagrant violation of Tupac's publicity and the estate's legal rights." Drake (Aubrey Drake Graham) dropped the diss track "Taylor Made Freestyle" last Friday, the latest chapter of the artist's simmering decade-long feud with Pulitzer and 17-time Grammy award winner Kendrick Lamar. "Kendrick, we need ya, the West Coast savior / Engraving your name in some hip-hop history," an AI-generated 2Pac recreation raps in Drake's track. "If you deal with this viciously / You seem a little nervous about all the publicity."

As millions of people across China travel to the graves of their ancestors to pay their respects for the annual tomb-sweeping festival, a new way of remembering, and reviving, their beloved relatives is being born. For as little as 20 yuan ( 2.20), Chinese netizens can create a moving digital avatar of their loved one, according to some services advertised online. So this year, to mark tomb-sweeping festival on Thursday, innovative mourners are turning to artificial intelligence to commune with the departed. At the more sophisticated end of the spectrum, the Taiwanese singer Bao Xiaobai used AI to "resurrect" his 22-year-old daughter, who died in 2022. Despite having only an audio recording of her speaking three sentences of English, Bao reportedly spent more than a year experimenting with AI technology before managing to create a video of his daughter singing happy birthday to her mother, which he published in January.

I had the pleasure of interviewing Kei Watanabe, Co-Founder of Glasp and Product Head of Product Development. Glasp is tackling a use case to democratize knowledge leveraging opportunities for everyone to share and develop their learnings, using highlighted information methods - in simple clicks. The vision of the company is to provide access to the highlighted world's information in one click, says Kei, but with a vision to share learnings and experiences that others have collected in their life long journey's. Glasp stands for "Greatest Legacy Accumulated as Shared Proof", with a vision visualize everyone's unique contribution to human knowledge history. I had a chance to review in detail the Glasp application user experience and I immediately could see this tool was a researcher's dream app or anyone that is trying to keep track of their own research or self-interest knowledge clips and keep the threads uniquely identified, but also others who have read the same material can be easily referenced.

The idea of conversing with mourners at your own funeral may sound like the plot from the latest episode of Black Mirror. But it could become a reality, thanks to a Los Angeles-based startup, which has developed a'holographic conversational vido experience'. StoryFile creates a digital clone of the subject by using 20 synchronised cameras to record them answering a series of questions. Experts then process the footage, tagging clips and using it to train an artificial intelligence (AI) that can provide responses to these questions in natural language. The finished product is then uploaded to the StoryFile platform, which can be interacted with after the individual has passed away.

It's been suggested that an advance party of robots will be needed if humans are ever to settle on other planets. Sent ahead to create conditions favorable for humankind, these robots will need to be tough, adaptable, and recyclable if they're to survive within the inhospitable cosmic climates that await them. Collaborating with roboticists and computer scientists, my team and I have been working on just such a set of robots. Produced via 3D printer – and assembled autonomously – the robots we're creating continually evolve in order to rapidly optimize for the conditions they find themselves in. Our work represents the latest progress towards the kind of autonomous robot ecosystems that could help build humanity's future homes, far away from Earth and far away from human oversight.