Xania Monet’s music is the stuff of nightmares. Thankfully her AI ‘clankers’ will be limited to this cultural moment | Van Badham

Xania Monet is the latest digital nightmare to emerge from a hellscape of AI content production. No wonder she’s popular … but how long will it last?The music iteration of AI “actor” Tilly Norwood, Xania is a composite product manufactured of digital tools: in this case, a photorealistic avatar accompanied by a sound that computers have generated to resemble that of a human voice singing words.Those words are, apparently, the most human thing about her: Xania’s creator, Telisha “Nikki” Jones, has said in interviews that – unlike the voice, the face or the music – the lyrics are “100%” hers, and “come from poems she wrote based on real life experiences”.Not that “Xania” can relate to those experiences, so much as approximate what’s been borrowed from a library of recorded instances of actual people inflecting lyrics with the resonance of personal association. Some notes may sound like Christina Aguilera, some sound like Beyoncé, but – unlike any of her influences – Xania “herself” is never going to mourn, fear, risk anything for the cause of justice, make a difficult second album, explore her sexuality, confront the reality of ageing, wank, eat a cupcake or die

French authorities investigate alleged Holocaust denial posts on Elon Musk’s Grok AI

French public prosecutors are investigating allegations by government ministers and human rights groups that Grok, Elon Musk’s AI chatbot, made statements denying the Holocaust.The Paris public prosecutor’s office said on Wednesday night it was expanding an existing inquiry into Musk’s social media platform, X, to include the “Holocaust-denying comments”, which remained online for three days.Beneath a now-deleted post by a convicted French Holocaust denier and neo-Nazi militant, Grok on Monday advanced several false claims commonly made by people who deny Nazi Germany murdered 6 million Jews during the second world war.The chatbot said in French that the gas chambers at the Nazi death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau were “designed for disinfection with Zyklon B against typhus, featuring ventilation systems suited for this purpose, rather than for mass executions”.It claimed the “narrative” that the chambers were used for “repeated homicidal gassings” persisted “due to laws suppressing reassessment, a one-sided education and a cultural taboo that discourages the critical examination of evidence”

‘We excel at every phase of AI’: Nvidia CEO quells Wall Street fears of AI bubble amid market selloff

Global share markets rose after Nvidia posted third-quarter earnings that beat Wall Street estimates, assuaging for now concerns about whether the high-flying valuations of AI firms had peaked.On Wednesday, all eyes were on Nvidia, the bellwether for the AI industry and the most valuable publicly traded company in the world, with analysts and investors hoping the chipmaker’s third-quarter earnings would dampen fears that a bubble was forming in the sector.Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of Nvidia, opened the earnings call with an attempt to dispel those concerns, saying that there was a major transformation happening in AI, and Nvidia was foundational to that transformation.“There’s been a lot of talk about an AI bubble,” said Huang. “From our vantage point, we see something very different

Nvidia earnings: Wall Street sighs with relief after AI wave doesn’t crash

Markets expectations around Wednesday’s quarterly earnings report by the most valuable publicly traded company in the world had risen to a fever pitch. Anxiety over billions in investment in artificial intelligence pervaded, in part because the US has been starved of reliable economic data by the recent government shutdown.Investors hoped that both questions would be in part answered by Nvidia’s earnings and by a jobs report due on Thursday morning.“This is a ‘So goes Nvidia, so goes the market’ kind of report,” Scott Martin, chief investment officer at Kingsview Wealth Management, told Bloomberg in a concise summary of market sentiment.The prospect of a market mood swing had built in advance of the earnings call, with options markets anticipating Nvidia’s shares could move 6%, or $280bn in value, up or down

Uber hit with legal demands to halt use of AI-driven pay systems

Uber has been hit with legal demands to stop using its artificial intelligence driven pay systems, which have been blamed for significantly reducing the incomes of the ride hailing app’s drivers.A letter before action – sent to the US company by the non-profit foundation, Worker Info Exchange (WIE), on Wednesday – is understood to allege that the ride hailing app has breached European data protection law by varying driver pay rates through its controversial algorithm.James Farrar, the director of WIE, said: “Uber has leveraged artificial intelligence and machine learning to implement deeply intrusive and exploitative pay-setting systems that have damaged the livelihoods of thousands of drivers.“Through this collective action, we intend to get a fairer deal for drivers and ensure Uber is held financially accountable for the harm caused by this unlawful use of AI.“This case is … about securing transparent, fair and safe working conditions for all platform workers

TikTok to give users power to reduce amount of AI content on their feeds

TikTok is giving users the power to reduce the amount of artificial intelligence-made content on their feeds, as it revealed the platform hosts more than 1bn AI videos.The change, which is being tested over the next few weeks before a global rollout, comes as new video-generating tools such as OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Veo 3 have spurred a surge in AI content online.The Guardian revealed in August that nearly one in 10 of the fastest-growing YouTube channels globally only show AI-generated videos. Many qualify as “AI slop”, the term for low-quality, mass-produced content that is often nonsensical or surreal.Jade Nester, TikTok’s European director of public policy for safety and privacy, said: “We know from our community that many people enjoy content made with AI tools, from digital art to science explainers, and we want to give people the power to see more or less of that, based on their own preferences