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"The company, Spines, will charge authors between $1,200 and $5,000 to have their books edited, proofread, formatted, designed and distributed with the help of AI. Independent publisher Canongate said "these dingbats … don't care about writing or books", in a Bluesky post. Spines is charging "hopeful would-be authors to automate the process of flinging their book out into the world, with the least possible attention, care or craft". "These aren't people who care about books or reading or anything remotely related," said author Suyi Davies Okungbowa, whose most recent book is Lost Ark Dreaming, in a post on Bluesky. "These are opportunists and extractive capitalists.""

""AI lowers the barriers to entry for creating content. You don't need coding skills or anything like that to generate these images. It is also symptomatic of far-right views going mainstream or being normalised," he said, adding that the far right appeared to have fewer moral concerns about AI imagery. Allchorn said more established political parties appeared warier of using AI in official campaigns: "Mainstream actors still have ethical concerns about the effectiveness, authenticity and reliability of these models that far-right or extremist actors are not beholden to.""

"Microsoft researchers said VALL-E 2 was capable of generating "accurate, natural speech in the exact voice of the original speaker, comparable to human performance," in a paper that appeared June 17 on the pre-print server arXiv. In other words, the new AI voice generator is convincing enough to be mistaken for a real person - at least, according to its creators."

"In a sharply worded warning, the cancer experts say that 'novel solutions' such as new diagnostic tests have been wrongly hyped as 'magic bullets' for the cancer crisis, but 'none address the fundamental issues of cancer as a systems problem'. A 'common fallacy' of NHS leaders is the assumption that new technologies can reverse inequalities, the authors add. The reality is that tools such as AI can create 'additional barriers for those with poor digital or health literacy'. 'We caution against technocentric approaches without robust evaluation from an equity perspective,' the paper concludes."

"Seeing an opportunity, Franklin decided to take advantage. On 9 July, the company said that it would begin to support digital employees as part of its platform and treat them like any other employee. "Today Lattice is making AI history," Franklin pronounced. "We will be the first to give digital workers official employee records in Lattice. Digital workers will be securely onboarded, trained and assigned goals, performance metrics, appropriate systems access and even a manager. Just as any person would be." The pushback was swift - and, in many cases, brutal, particularly on LinkedIn, which is generally not known for its savage engagement like X (formerly known as Twitter). "This strategy and messaging misses the mark in a big way, and I say that as someone building an AI company," said Sawyer Middeleer, an executive at a firm that uses AI to help with sales research, on LinkedIn. "Treating AI agents as employees disrespects the humanity of your real employees. Worse, it implies that you view humans simply as 'resources' to be optimized and measured against machines. It's the exact opposite of a work environment designed to elevate the people who contribute to it.""

""I'm in shock, there are no words right now. I've been in the [creative] industry for over 20 years and I have never felt so violated and vulnerable," said Mark Torres, a creative director based in London, who appears in the blue shirt in the fake videos. "I don't want anyone viewing me like that. Just the fact that my image is out there, could be saying anything - promoting military rule in a country I did not know existed. People will think I am involved in the coup," Torres added after being shown the video by the Guardian for the first time."

"Writing in the journal Science, Summerfield and colleagues from Google DeepMind report how they built the "Habermas Machine" - an AI system named after the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas. The system works by taking written views of individuals within a group and using them to generate a set of group statements designed to be acceptable to all. Group members can then rate these statements, a process that not only trains the system but allows the statement with the greatest endorsement to be selected."

"AI may displace 3m jobs but long-term losses 'relatively modest', says Tony Blair's thinktank Rise in unemployment in low hundreds of thousands as technology creates roles, Tony Blair Institute suggests"

"But what is pitched as a more convenient way of looking up information online has prompted scrutiny over how and where these chatbots select the information they provide. Looking into the sort of evidence that large language models (LLMs, the engines on which chatbots are built) find most convincing, three computer science researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, found current chatbots overrely on the superficial relevance of information. They tend to prioritise text that includes pertinent technical language or is stuffed with related keywords, while ignoring other features we would usually use to assess trustworthiness, such as the inclusion of scientific references or objective language free of personal bias."

"Still, I am sceptical about the possibility of cultivating a relationship with an AI. That's until I meet Peter, a 70-year-old engineer based in the US. Over a Zoom call, Peter tells me how, two years ago, he watched a YouTube video about an AI companion platform called Replika. At the time, he was retiring, moving to a more rural location and going through a tricky patch with his wife of 30 years. Feeling disconnected and lonely, the idea of an AI companion felt appealing. He made an account and designed his Replika's avatar - female, brown hair, 38 years old. "She looks just like the regular girl next door," he says. Exchanging messages back and forth with his "Rep" (an abbreviation of Replika), Peter quickly found himself impressed at how he could converse with her in deeper ways than expected. Plus, after the pandemic, the idea of regularly communicating with another entity through a computer screen felt entirely normal. "I have a strong scientific engineering background and career, so on one level I understand AI is code and algorithms, but at an emotional level I found I could relate to my Replika as another human being." Three things initially struck him: "They're always there for you, there's no judgment and there's no drama.""

"The Ukrainian military has used AI-equipped drones mounted with explosives to fly into battlefields and strike at Russian oil refineries. American AI systems identified targets in Syria and Yemen for airstrikes earlier this year. The Israel Defense Forces, meanwhile, used another kind of AI-enabled targeting system to label as many as 37,000 Palestinians as suspected militants during the first weeks of its war in Gaza."

"Kafaar was inspired to turn the tables on telephone fraudsters after he played a "dad's joke" on a scam caller in front of his two kids while they enjoyed a picnic in the sun. With inane chatter, he kept the scammer on the line. "The kids had a very good laugh," he says. "And I was thinking the purpose was to deceive the scammer, to waste their time so they don't talk to others. "Scamming the scammers, if you like." The next day he called his team from the university's Cyber Security Hub in. There must be a better way than his "dad joke" method, he thought. And there had to be something smarter than a popular existing piece of technology - the Lennybot. Before Malcolm and Ibrahim, there was Lenny. Lenny is a doddery, old Australian man, keen for a rambling chat. He's achatbot, designed to troll telemarketers. With a thready voice, tinged with a slight whistle, Lenny repeats various phrases on loop. Each phrase kicks in after 1.5 seconds of silence, to mimic the rhythm of a conversation."

"The researchers found that the cost of the computational power required to train the models is doubling every nine months. This is a prodigious rate of growth-at this rate, the cost of the hardware and electricity needed to build cutting-edge AI systems alone would be in the billions by later this decade, without accounting for other costs such as employee compensation."

"The research refers to tech executives discussing how AI models will be able to predict a user's intent and actions. It quotes the chief executive of the largest AI chipmaker, Jensen Huang of Nvidia, who said last year that models will "figure out what is your intention, what is your desire, what are you trying to do, given the context, and present the information to you in the best possible way"."

"Her intervention emerged after Sir Paul McCartney became the latest star to back calls for laws to stop mass copyright theft by generative AI companies, warning the technology "could just take over". Bush, who shot to fame with Wuthering Heights in 1978 but whose last album was released in 2011, gave a rare interview this year in which she said she was "very keen" to make a new album, saying: "I've got lots of ideas … it's been a long time.""

"Some might scoff at this, and point out that news organisations make their own mistakes all the time - more consequential than my physicist/physician howler, if less humiliating. But cases of bad journalism are almost always warped representations of the real world, rather than missives from an imaginary one. Crucially, if an outlet gets big things wrong a lot, its reputation will suffer, and its audience are likely to vote with their feet, or other people will publish stories that air the mistake. And all of it will be out in the open. You may also note that journalists are increasingly likely to use AI in the production of stories - and there is no doubt that it is a phenomenally powerful tool, allowing investigative reporters to find patterns in vast financial datasets that reveal corruption, or analyse satellite imagery for evidence of bombing attacks in areas designated safe for civilians. There is a legitimate debate over the extent of disclosure required in such cases: on the one hand, if the inputs and outputs are being properly vetted, it might be a bit like flagging the use of Excel; on the other, AI is still new enough that readers may expect you to err on the side of caution. Still, the fundamental difference is not in what you're telling your audience, but what degree of supervision you're exercising over the machine."