Visier Announces World's First Analytic AI Agent Platform to Augment and Extend Every Employee's Performance and ProductivityJuan Soto could decide on his next team before or during baseball's winter meetingsTrump cites Hunter Biden pardon in latest legal attempt to throw out hush money conviction
Voice cloning is an emerging technology powered by artificial intelligence and it's raising alarms about its potential misuse. Earlier this year, New Hampshire voters experienced this firsthand when a deepfake mimicking President Joe Biden’s voice urged them to skip the polls ahead of the primary. The deepfake likely needed only several seconds of the president's voice to create the clone. According to multiple AI voice cloning models, about 10 seconds of an actual voice is all that is needed to recreate it. And that can easily come from a phone call or a video from social media. "A person's voice is really probably not that information-dense. It's not as unique as you may think," James Betker, a technical staff member at OpenAI, told Scripps News. Betker developed TortoiseTTS, an open-source voice cloning model. "It's actually very easy to model, very easy to learn, the distribution of all human voices from a fairly small amount of data," Betker added. How AI voice cloning works AI models have been trained on vast amounts of data, learning to recognize human speech. Programs analyze the data and train repeatedly, learning characteristics such as rhythm, stress, pitch and tone. "It can look at 10 seconds of someone speaking and it has stored enough information about how humans speak with that kind of prosody and pitch. Enough information about how people speak with their processing pitch and its weights that it can just continue on," Betker said. Imagine a trained AI model as a teacher, and the person cloning the voice to be a student. When a student asks to create a cloned voice, it starts off as white noise. The teacher scores how close the student is to sounding correct. The student tries again and again based on these scores until the student produces something close to what the teacher wants. While this explanation is extremely simplified, the concept of generating a cloned voice is based on bit-by-bit, based on probability distributions. "I think, at its core, it's pretty simple," Betker said. "I think the analogy of just continuing with what you're given will take you pretty far here." There are currently some AI models that claim to only need two seconds of samples. While the results are not convincing yet, Betker says future models will need even fewer voice samples to create a convincing clone.Sussex hospice group starting 'social enterprise' project
Tennessee Vols butt of no more jokes and playoff-bound revived by Josh Heupel
DETROIT — A Muslim Democrat kicked out of a rally featuring Vice President and Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris at the Royal Oak Musical Theatre last month sued the entertainment venue Thursday in federal court. The lawsuit by Ahmed Ghanim of Ferndale accuses venue officials of discrimination based on race and religion, denial of public accommodation in violation of the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act and, intentional infliction of emotional distress. He is seeking an unspecified amount of damages. Javascript is required for you to be able to read premium content. Please enable it in your browser settings.How to protect your communications through encryption
NoneHow to protect your communications through encryptionA 7-year-old rivalry between tech leaders Elon Musk and Sam Altman over who should run OpenAI and prevent an artificial intelligence "dictatorship" is now heading to a federal judge as Musk seeks to halt the ChatGPT maker's ongoing shift into a for-profit company. Musk, an early OpenAI investor and board member, sued the artificial intelligence company earlier this year alleging it had betrayed its founding aims as a nonprofit research lab benefiting the public good rather than pursuing profits. Musk has since escalated the dispute, adding new claims and asking for a court order that would stop OpenAI’s plans to convert itself into a for-profit business more fully. The world's richest man, whose companies include Tesla, SpaceX and social media platform X, last year started his own rival AI company, xAI. Musk says it faces unfair competition from OpenAI and its close business partner Microsoft, which has supplied the huge computing resources needed to build AI systems such as ChatGPT. “OpenAI and Microsoft together exploiting Musk’s donations so they can build a for-profit monopoly, one now specifically targeting xAI, is just too much,” says Musk's filing that alleges the companies are violating the terms of Musk’s foundational contributions to the charity. OpenAI is filing a response Friday opposing Musk’s requested order, saying it would cripple OpenAI’s business and mission to the advantage of Musk and his own AI company. A hearing is set for January before U.S. District Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers in Oakland. At the heart of the dispute is a 2017 internal power struggle at the fledgling startup that led to Altman becoming OpenAI's CEO. Musk also wanted the job, according to emails revealed as part of the court case, but grew frustrated after two other OpenAI co-founders said he would hold too much power as a major shareholder and chief executive if the startup succeeded in its goal to achieve better-than-human AI known as artificial general intelligence , or AGI. Musk has long voiced concerns about how advanced forms of AI could threaten humanity. “The current structure provides you with a path where you end up with unilateral absolute control over the AGI," said a 2017 email to Musk from co-founders Ilya Sutskever and Greg Brockman. “You stated that you don't want to control the final AGI, but during this negotiation, you've shown to us that absolute control is extremely important to you.” In the same email, titled “Honest Thoughts,” Sutskever and Brockman also voiced concerns about Altman's desire to be CEO and whether he was motivated by “political goals.” Altman eventually succeeded in becoming CEO, and has remained so except for a period last year when he was fired and then reinstated days later after the board that ousted him was replaced. OpenAI published the messages Friday in a blog post meant to show its side of the story, particularly Musk's early support for the idea of making OpenAI a for-profit business so it could raise money for the hardware and computer power that AI needs. It was Musk, through his wealth manager Jared Birchall, who first registered “Open Artificial Technologies Technologies, Inc.”, a public benefit corporation, in September 2017. Then came the “Honest Thoughts” email that Musk described as the “final straw.” “Either go do something on your own or continue with OpenAI as a nonprofit,” Musk wrote back. OpenAI said Musk later proposed merging the startup into Tesla before resigning as the co-chair of OpenAI's board in early 2018. Musk didn't immediately respond to emailed requests for comment sent to his companies Friday. Asked about his frayed relationship with Musk at a New York Times conference last week, Altman said he felt “tremendously sad” but also characterized Musk’s legal fight as one about business competition. “He’s a competitor and we’re doing well,” Altman said. He also said at the conference that he is “not that worried” about the Tesla CEO’s influence with President-elect Donald Trump. OpenAI said Friday that Altman plans to make a $1 million personal donation to Trump’s inauguration fund, joining a number of tech companies and executives who are working to improve their relationships with the incoming administration. —————————— The Associated Press and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement allowing OpenAI access to part of the AP’s text archives.
TORONTO — Strength in base metal stocks helped lift Canada's main stock index Tuesday, while U.S. stock markets were mixed. Markets took on a cautious tone Tuesday, said Greg Taylor, chief investment officer at Purpose Investments. “We had a super strong month of November across the board, and then yesterday was kind of a bit of a give back,” he said, noting that weakness in commodities held the TSX back on Monday. The S&P/TSX composite index closed up 45.40 points on Tuesday at 25,635.73. In New York, the Dow Jones industrial average was down 76.47 points at 44,705.53. The S&P 500 index was up 2.73 points at 6,049.88, while the Nasdaq composite was up 76.96 points at 19,480.91. In Canada, Scotiabank was the first major bank to report earnings, with the rest to come in short order as the sector caps off earnings season. The bank saw its earnings rise year-over-year, and it set aside a smaller sum for loan losses than it did a year ago. However, its profit came in below analyst expectations, and Scotiabank said it expects continued pressure on loan growth in the coming months. Scotiabank’s share price fell more than three per cent, but Taylor said that was likely investors taking some profit after a strong several months for the stock. “There’s not a lot of expectations for any fireworks from the banks this week,” he said. In the U.S., a report showed U.S. employers advertised slightly more job openings at the end of October than they did the month before, ahead of the monthly jobs report at the end of the week. The U.S. Federal Reserve is set to make its last interest rate decision of the year later this month. “The payroll number Friday is going to be interesting to watch,” said Taylor. “It's certainly a case that if you did get a really strong number, you might get some people putting into question the need for another rate cut at this meeting.” But while economic strength and the promised policies of president-elect Donald Trump could mean fewer rate cuts than previously expected in 2025, Taylor said a cut from the Fed later this month is a “foregone conclusion.” In Canada, where the economy hasn’t weathered high rates as well, another cut is expected next week from the central bank, said Taylor. However, if the Fed does pull back on cuts in the coming year, Canada may have to move with more caution, he said, as the divergence could put further downward pressure on the loonie. The Canadian dollar traded for 71.14 cents US, compared with 71.14 cents US on Monday. The January crude oil contract was up US$1.84 at US$69.94 per barrel and the January natural gas contract was down 17 cents at US$3.04 per mmBTU. The February gold contract was up US$9.40 at US$2,667.90 an ounce and the March copper contract was up 13 cents at US$4.20 a pound. — With files from The Associated Press This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 3, 2024. Companies in this story: (TSX:GSPTSE, TSX:CADUSD) Rosa Saba, The Canadian Press
AP News Summary at 2:23 p.m. ESTAP News Summary at 6:04 p.m. EST
New Jersey governor wants more federal resources for probe into drone sightingsIan Schieffelin, Clemson topple Penn State to win Sunshine Slam
COLUMBUS, Ohio (AP) — Will Howard passed for two touchdowns and rushed for another, TreVeyon Henderson ran for a score and No. 2 Ohio State beat previously undefeated No. 5 Indiana 38-15 on Saturday. All Ohio State (10-1, 7-1 Big Ten, CFP No. 2) has to do now is beat Michigan at home next Saturday and it will earn a return to the Big Ten championship game for the first time since 2020 and get a rematch with No. 1 Oregon. The Ducks beat Ohio State 32-31 in a wild one back on Oct. 12. Javascript is required for you to be able to read premium content. Please enable it in your browser settings.