OpenAI has temporarily stopped its artificial intelligence (AI) app Sora creating deepfake videos portraying Dr Martin Luther King Jr, following a request from his estate. It said disrespectful content had been generated about the civil rights campaigner. Sora has become popular in the US for making hyper-realistic AI-generated videos, which has led to people sharing clips of deceased celebrities and historical figures in outlandish and often offensive scenarios. OpenAI said it would pause images of Dr King as it strengthens guardrails for historical figures - but it continues to allow people to make clips of others. The firm has faced controversy over this stance, as videos featuring notable figures such as President John F. Kennedy, Queen Elizabeth II and Professor Stephen Hawking have been shared widely online.

On Sunday, our thoughtful and reserved president reposted on his Truth Social site a video generated by artificial intelligence that falsely showed former President Obama being arrested and imprisoned. There are those among you who think this is high humor; those among you who who find it as tiresome as it is offensive; and those among you blissfully unaware of the mental morass that is Truth Social. Whatever camp you fall into, the video crosses all demographics by being expected -- just another crazy Trump stunt in a repetitive cycle of division and diversion so frequent it makes Groundhog Day seem fresh. But there are three reasons why this particular video -- not made by the president but amplified to thousands -- is worth noting, and maybe even worth fearing. First, it is flat-out racist. In it, Obama is ripped out of a chair in the Oval Office and forced onto his knees, almost bowing, to a laughing Trump.

Large language models (LLMs) can be used to serve as agents to simulate human behaviors, given the powerful ability to understand human instructions and provide high-quality generated texts. Such ability stimulates us to wonder whether LLMs can simulate a person in a higher form than simple human behaviors. Therefore, we aim to train an agent with the profile, experience, and emotional states of a specific person instead of using limited prompts to instruct ChatGPT API. In this work, we introduce Character-LLM that teach LLMs to act as specific people such as Beethoven, Queen Cleopatra, Julius Caesar, etc. Our method focuses on editing profiles as experiences of a certain character and training models to be personal simulacra with these experiences. To assess the effectiveness of our approach, we build a test playground that interviews trained agents and evaluates whether the agents \textit{memorize} their characters and experiences. Experimental results show interesting observations that help build future simulacra of humankind.

Tucked away in an office on a quiet Los Angeles street, past hallways chockablock with miniature props and movie posters, is a cavernous motion-capture studio. And in that studio is the National Mall in Washington, D.C., in 1963, on the day Martin Luther King Jr. delivered his "I Have a Dream" speech. Or rather, it was inside that room that the visual-effects studio Digital Domain captured the expressions, movements and spirit of King, so that he could appear digitally in The March, a virtual reality experience that TIME has produced in partnership with the civil rights leader's estate. The experience, which is executive–produced and narrated by actor Viola Davis, draws on more than a decade of research in machine learning and human anatomy to create a visually striking re-creation of the country's National Mall circa 1963--and of King himself. When work on the project began more than three years ago, a big question needed answering.