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Evening Standard
Evening Standard
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Jon Weeks

Fake AI-generated Joe Biden voice tells people not to vote - Tech & Science Daily podcast

An AI-generated voice replicating US president Joe Biden has been used to try to convince voters in New Hampshire not to vote in the state’s Republican primary election.

The recorded message is reported to have said Biden’s catchphrase “What a bunch of malarkey”, before telling citizens to “save their votes” for the November presidential election.

It was sent to several people in the state, ahead of Tuesday’s election this week, when residents voted for their republican candidate.

The White House confirmed Mr Biden did not record the call, and said it highlights the challenges of emerging tech like artificial intelligence, especially in the run-up to November’s election.

There’s new hope for planets outside of our solar system which could potentially host alien life.

Astronomers at the University of Warwick used data from Nasa’s Transitioning Exoplanet Survey Satellite, called TESS for short, to look for possible planets orbiting stars.

85 candidate exoplanets similar in size to Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune were spotted, which take between 20 and 700 days to orbit their host stars.

The astronomers said some of those 85 exist in the so-called habitable zone; the optimal distance away from their host star, so they’re cool enough to potentially sustain life.

An 11-year-old boy from Morocco who was born deaf has been able to hear for the first time in his life, thanks to gene therapy carried out in the US.

Aissam Dam was born with an extremely rare form of congenital deafness, caused by a mutation in a single gene, otoferlin.

In October last year he underwent a surgical procedure injecting a harmless virus into his eardrum, which had been modified to transport working copies of the otoferlin gene into the internal fluid of his cochlea. 

In France, Amazon has been fined 32 million euros for ‘excessive’ surveillance of workers.

The country’s data watchdog CNIL said data recorded by handheld scanners used by staff measured interruptions in activity so precisely that it led workers to have to justify each break or interruption, and was in fact illegal.

In response, Amazon said the inquiry was carried out without a single visit by the case handler to its sites, and a spokesperson called the conclusions ‘factually incorrect’ and said they ‘reserve the right to file an appeal’.

Also in this episode:

‘Drip pricing’ set to be banned as part of online shopping reforms, Doomsday Clock remains at 90 seconds to midnight, Nintendo sets date to shut down online play for 3DS and Wii U, and new emperor penguin colonies found by satellite.

Listen above, find us on Apple, Spotify or lnk.to/x494eZlnk.to/x494eZ.

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