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Evening Standard
Evening Standard
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Jon Weeks

AI voice cloning tools manipulated to imitate political leaders - Tech & Science Daily

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The Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH) is warning that AI-powered voice cloning tools can be used to create disinformation during elections, using the voices of prominent political figures.

The CCDH tested six of the leading AI audio generation platforms to see if they could create fake clips of leading politicians.

Chief executive Imran Ahmed told Tech & Science Daily how they had to do ‘jail-breaking’ on some sites to get around certain safeguards, but admitted it was quite easy to do.

He’s calling for AI voice cloning sites to have better safeguards in place.

The James Webb Space Telescope has broken its own record for spotting the most distant known galaxy.

It’s called JADES-GS-z14-0 and Nasa estimates it is from a time 290 million years after the Big Bang.

That makes it even further away than the previous record holder - a galaxy seen at 325 million years after the Big Bang.

Google has defended its AI Overviews tool after it went viral for producing bizarre results for some users.

The tech giant said for some queries that had barely been searched before, such as “How many rocks should I eat?”, the tool took information from satirical content online, giving the result “at least one small rock per day".

Google said in some cases like this, where there was a “data void” or “information gap” (where there’s a limited amount of high quality content about a topic) AI Overviews gave results from sarcastic or troll-y content from discussion forums.

In a blog post the company revealed it has made some fixes, including building better detection mechanisms for nonsensical queries that shouldn’t show an AI Overviews, and updating their systems to limit the use of user-generated content in responses that could offer misleading advice.

The world’s largest ‘botnet’ - a group of infected computers that hackers operate remotely to conduct mass cyber attacks and scams - has been taken down.

A Chinese national has been arrested for allegedly being the mastermind behind a botnet that was used to steal billions of dollars.

FBI Director Christopher Wrey said the "911 S5" botnet infected computers in nearly 200 countries and facilitated crimes including financial frauds, identity theft and child exploitation.

35-year-old Yunhe Wang was arrested in Singapore last week, and allegedly made at least $99m by selling access to criminals who used the botnet for scams.

Also in this episode:

  • Footage shows lava rivers after Iceland volcano eruption
  • Supermarket to use laser etchings on avocados instead of stickers
  • Are AI-generated emojis coming to iOS 18?
  • Octopus caught on camera changing its colour at North Wales beach

Listen above, find us on Apple, Spotify or wherever you stream your podcasts.

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