Her place in film history was secured when she famously sang'Somewhere over the Rainbow' in'The Wizard of Oz'. Now, fans of Judy Garland can continue to listen to her voice from beyond the grave, as part of a new deal to narrate audiobooks using artificial intelligence. ElevenLabs, a London-based business launched by two Polish entrepreneurs, said it had reached deals with the estates of Ms Garland and Sir Laurence Olivier to clone their voices. Users who download an app will then be able to pick celebrities – including those who are no longer alive – to narrate their favourite books, articles and even PDFs. 'It's exciting to see our mother's voice available to the countless millions of people who love her,' said Liza Minnelli, Ms Garland's daughter and representative of her estate. Her place in film history was secured when she famously sang'Somewhere over the Rainbow' in the 1939 film'The Wizard of Oz' (pictured).

Evans' mention of Beatles legend John Lennon ended up becoming somewhat of a reality, but not in the hands of just any creator, but fellow Beatle Paul McCartney. Earlier this year, McCartney told BBC Radio 4's Today show that there was a new final song from the band in the works, with the assistance of AI. "When we came to make what will be the last Beatles record it was a demo that John had – that we worked on and we just finished it up – it'll be released this year. We were able to take John's voice and get it pure through this AI so that then we could mix the record as you would normally do," McCartney said. After some backlash from fans, McCartney clarified that Lennon's vocals were original and not generated by computer. "We've seen some confusion and speculation about it," he shared to X. "Can't say too much at this stage but to be clear, nothing has been artificially or synthetically created. It's all real and we all play on it. We cleaned up some existing recordings – a process which has gone on for years," he assured angry fans. The last two surviving Beatles, Ringo Starr and Paul McCartney, have made it clear that there is nothing artificially generated about their late bandmate John Lennon's voice in a new song, set to be released later this year.

It took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that the "black mirror" of the popular anthology series Black Mirror was a screen, or rather, all the screens we surround ourselves with: phones, tablets, computers, TVs, and, increasingly, futuristic devices built by massive corporations that monitor our movements and preferences and words. We buy these black mirrors, welcoming them into our homes and lives and letting them -- true to their name -- reflect ourselves back to us. And as we know all too well, those reflections sometimes betray our darkest impulses. Unsettling reflections are not the black mirrors' fault. Gadgets are merely assemblages of wires and metal and glass. Devices don't have a point of view; they operate according to the input they receive, the algorithms and designs and patterns that power the software, written by humans and thus shaded and slanted by human biases.

James Dean, who has been dead for 64 years, is set to star in an upcoming movie about the Vietnam War. According to the Hollywood Reporter, the movie, an adaptation of Gareth Crocker's novel, Finding Jack, will feature a computer-generated image (CGI) version of Dean. "We searched high and low for the perfect character to portray the role of Rogan, which has some extreme complex character arcs, and after months of research, we decided on James Dean," says Anton Ernst, one of the film's co-directors. Dean will be constructed through "full-body" CGI using archival footage from his films – he will be physically captured through the movements of an actor and voiced by another actor. The fact that the directors couldn't find an actor of this capability in an age where much so much untapped talent is available is questionable.

SenSat, a geospatial technology startup that digitizes real-world places for infrastructure projects, has raised $10 million in a series A round of funding led by Chinese tech titan Tencent, with participation from Russian investment firm Sistema Venture Capital. Founded out of London in 2015, SenSat is setting out to help organizations, such as those working in the construction, mining, and energy industries, create so-called "digital twins" of locations relevant to projects they're working on. The company said that it translates the real world into a version that can be understood by machines and thus suitable for training artificial intelligence (AI) systems. These digital twins are constructed using various different data-types, including real-time data generated from wearables, physical sensors connected to assets on the ground, traffic data, and 3D image data captured from satellites, Lidar, and drones. Indeed, SenSat is actually one of the U.K.'s biggest drone data providers, due in part to its Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) license that enables it to fly fixed-wing drones up to 12km away from the pilot -- in other words, far beyond the controller's line-of-sight.