ElevenLabs' Prime Voice AI tool has been dangerously misused to generate the voices of celebrities, including Joe Rogan, James Cameron, Joe Biden, and Emma Watson, spewing racial slurs and making outrageous comments. ElevenLabs, a startup that aims to have created the most realistic and versatile artificial intelligence (AI) speech software, has found itself in the spotlight for the latest misuse of AI technology. It allows anyone to upload recordings and generate an artificial voice on their basis. Motherboard first reported the types of AI-generated recordings released on 4chan. As such, Emma Watson can be heard reading out a section of Hitler's Mein Kampf.

A few days ago, speech AI startup ElevenLabs launched a beta version of its platform that gives users the power to create entirely new synthetic voices for text-to-speech audio or to clone somebody's voice. Well, it only took the internet a few days to start using the latter for vile purposes. The company has revealed on Twitter that it's seeing an "increasing number of voice cloning misuse cases" and that it's thinking of a way to address the problem by "implementing additional safeguards." While ElevenLabs didn't elaborate on what it meant by "misuse cases," Motherboard found 4chan posts with clips featuring generated voices that sound like celebrities reading or saying something questionable. One clip, for instance, reportedly featured a voice that sounded like Emma Watson reading a part of Mein Kampf.

Sheep showed they were not as silly as people think after managing to pick Barack Obama out of a line-up. But when it comes to recognising faces, they may still only have a woolly sense of what people look like. Sadly for those excited by sheep being able to recognise former president Obama, actress Emma Watson and newsreader Fiona Bruce, the animals' intelligence may not have been quite what it seemed. Sheep were able to identify Barack Obama, Emma Watson (pictured) and Fiona Bruce from a line-up. Psychologists now say sheep are not as good as humans at recognising people, and the evidence is that they don't seem to know their own handlers Psychologists now say sheep are not as good as humans at recognising people, and the evidence is that they don't seem to know their own handlers.

Face retrieval has received much attention over the past few decades, and many efforts have been made in retrieving face images against pose, illumination, and expression variations. However, the conventional works fail to meet the requirements of a potential and novel task---retrieving a person's face image at a specific age, especially when the specific "age" is not given as a numeral, i.e. "retrieving someone's image at the similar age period shown by another person's image." To tackle this problem, we propose a dual reference face retrieval framework in this paper, where the system takes two inputs: an identity reference image which indicates the target identity and an age reference image which reflects the target age. In our framework, the raw images are first projected on a joint manifold, which preserves both the age and identity locality. Then two similarity metrics of age and identity are exploited and optimized by utilizing our proposed quartet-based model. The experiments show promising results, outperforming hierarchical methods.

Thu 25 Jan 2018 12.07 EST Last modified on Thu 25 Jan 2018 12.33 EST Advanced machine learning technology is being used to create fake pornography featuring real actors and pop stars, pasting their faces over existing performers in explicit movies. The resulting clips, made without consent from the women whose faces are used, are often indistinguishable from a real film, with only subtly uncanny differences suggesting something is amiss. A community on the social news site Reddit has spent months creating and sharing the images, which were initially made by a solo hobbyist who went by the name "deepfake". When the technology site Motherboard first reported on the user in December last year, they had already made images featuring women including Wonder Woman star Gal Gadot, Taylor Swift, Scarlett Johansson, and Game of Thrones actor Maisie Williams. In the months since, videos featuring other celebrities including Star Wars lead Daisy Ridley, Game of Thrones's Sophie Turner, and Harry Potter star Emma Watson have been posted on the site, which has become the main location for sharing the clips.

Trendy mindfulness reduces stress levels by more than half by changing the structure of the brain, new research reveals. Mindfulness, which involves paying attention to the present moment, relieves tension by 51 per cent by boosting regions of the brain associated with attention, function and compassion, a study found. The ancient Buddhist meditation, which is championed by the likes of Gwyneth Paltrow and Emma Watson, and is even recommended by the NHS, also makes people feel better within themselves, the research adds. In particular, practicing mindfulness by sharing challenging experiences with others may help to reduce social shame, which is a common trigger for stress, according to the researchers. Lead author Professor Tania Singer from the Max Planck Institute of Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Germany, said: 'As empathy, compassion and perspective-taking are crucial competencies for successful social interactions, conflict resolution and cooperation, these findings are highly relevant'.

Nude and private photos of celebrities including Emma Watson and Amanda Seyfried are circulating online, according to reports, leading to fears of a second major hacking attack. As with 2014's famous iCloud attack, the photos appear to have been stolen from people's phones and then traded online. In both cases, the photos appear to be old – suggesting that, like 2014's attack, the pictures have been circulating among collectors for some time. It is likely that the photos were stolen using fairly simple cyber attacks, of the kind that could hit anyone. While the recent spate of cyber attacks have become famous because of who they affected and the nature of the photos, the same techniques could be used to steal the most personal information from anyone.

For her second feature documentary, "National Bird," director Sonia Kennebeck puts a face on the victims of drone warfare who are both in the United States and abroad. Part of the technology's appeal is the distance -- both physical and emotional -- between the U.S. armed forces and their targets, but the film argues that military personel are affected, even if they are never in the same country as the people considered collateral damage. At the heart of "National Bird" are three whistle-blowers. Heather is a former drone imagery analyst who struggles with PTSD and takes her story to the Guardian. Daniel is a former government contractor and signals intelligence analyst who worries about what he can and cannot share with everyone in his life.