But whilst some fear the rise of ai clones, companies including zoom say we should be excited about a future where your clone can go to a meeting on your behalf. Well, joe tidy, and his clone, report. This is an ai clone, not just of my face and voice, of my thoughts as well, trained on my public profile. Hello, joe. What is it thatjoe tidy likes to do for fun? i enjoy participating in triathlons, marathons and wild swimming. I also like golfing and i'm a movie geek. Aside from the long delays, it works pretty well, one to one. What if i send it to a work meeting? these ai clones are more about attending meetings than doing the whole job. Keeps things interesting, though. They laugh before we try that, it needs a few tweaks with these engineers, who are experts in making bespoke chatbots. There's growing excitement for al clones across the industry. The ceo of zoom says in the future, we'll be able to offload some of our more mundane meetings to the bots. It sounds bonkers, but things are moving fast. With al services, you don't need any technical skill. These days, you can make a video of anybody saying anything in any language quite easily. Male voice: but putting an avatar into a live meeting that looks like and sounds like someone is far more complex. Police in hong kong are investigating just that possibility after an employee from a british construction firm, arup, was tricked during a video call in february. Criminals operating an ai clone of his boss successfully persuaded him to transfer more than $25 million in a fake deal. It's thought to be the first case of so—called ceo fraud being done with an ai clone during a video call. This type of crime has historically been done through emails, but with al, criminals have far more tools to play with. My team, upon seeing the ndi, i will be able to furnish you with additional details to ensure the successful completion of this operation. Yeah, i mean, they were quite lifelike — and actually, later on in the process, _ when i actually forwarded these to someone who's known him for years, he actually said, ok, well, that actually could be marco. Martin was targeted by criminals who sent him voice notes that sounded like his new boss and almost convinced him into transferring £800,000 to them. Man speaks spanish man speaks italian so presumably the criminals would have taken maybe even that video, put it through a machine, then made your bespoke voice notes? absolutely. Only need a few seconds, apparently, of speech to work with and they pick up the mannerisms, they pick up the kind of way and the language and the way it's used and actually quite, quite believable, really. Martin only spotted the scam after triple—checking an email address used by the scammers pretending to be a lawyer. Ai voice cloning attacks are becoming more common, but pulling off a convincing live video call with face and voice cloning that can be controlled by scammers is thought to be much harder. Then again, saying you've got bad signal can cover up many flaws. Hi, tim. But what about sending a full ai clone to a meeting on your behalf, then, for non—criminal purposes? this is the weekly tech news planning meeting. Hey, how's it going? good, thank you. Oh, it is al, isn't it? it's ai, it's definitely ai. I said it was alto start with. The blinking was so weird. Interestingly, though, some were more unsure than others. Graham, lily, werej you, were you on it as quickly as liv and tom were? no, i was not. I was not. But also, i'm on my phone and so it's smaller than it would be if i were. . . If i had it up on my computer. For me, joe just looks really, really unwell, and ijust didn't want to be impolite. This ai clone, then, was fooling no—one, but its creator says there's definite potential. There are differences in expectations. If i'm telling you i have created a digital twin, it acts exactly like me, you would pretty soon tell me that no, this is not you. On the other hand, if i say, hey, i have an assistant, it's an ai, you'd have a completely different set of expectations. This face—swapping technology does cost a lot of money to do right. But again, everything gets cheaper and it happens so fast. All the perils and positives of ai clones are coming at us fast. Clearly, we're going to have to start working a lot harder to make sure we know who's on the other side of that screen. How can i assist you? we're getting used to ai being able to do uncannily human things, chatting with us, creating pictures and videos. But so far, all of this ai has used a lot of computing power. Even if you've been doing these things on your phone, it's been massive supercomputers in the cloud that have been doing the work and then sending the results down to your device. See, it turns out that the chips these computers were already fitted with, called graphics processing units, gpus, are also really good at the calculations needed for al. It's also the reason why gpu manufacturer nvidia has risen to be one of the most valuable companies in the world. But in the last year or so, we've seen the arrival of a new type of chip, an npu — neural processing unit. Now, these are specifically made for al, and because they are smaller than gpus, it means you can fit �*em in one of these. That means that these chips can do some limited al on your phone. And that's why we've started to hear phone manufacturers hyping up their apple intelligence, samsung advanced intelligence, and enhanced personal assistants like siri and google�*s gemini, that can have more natural conversations with us. How can i embarrass my sister during a wedding toast, but, like, respectfully? ok, here's the deal. New honor phones will understand the contents of your messages and open the best app to assist in whatever you've received. If it's an address, for example, it'll open maps. This samsung phone can now take your handwritten notes, summarise them and make them into lists. Ihr telefon kann in echtzeit ubersetzen. Phone: your phone can translate in realtime _ and in fact, google�*s new pixel phones will listen to your phone calls and summarise them for you in text form after you hang up. One of the most recognisably ai things you can do these days is mess around with your photos. So if you want something removed from your shot, including, er, you, well, you can tap it, erase it, and the phone will fill in the gap with a pretty good approximation of the background. So now a few roadworks won't spoil your holiday snaps, and a random photo bomber won't ruin that otherwise beautiful moment. Remember, though, generative ai can have its moments, so don't rely on it to understand exactly what you're after. He laughs ok, it got rid of the bin. . . . . And put another bin there! as well as removing things, you can also do completely the opposite — adding things in that weren't there in the first place. It's notjust phones that are getting smarter, mind you. This is the latest microsoft surface pro, one of the new copilot+ brand of pcs and tablets with onboard npus. Now, this uses the in—built ai in a number of ways. First, would you believe, good old microsoft paint has had a generative ai upgrade. Now you can be a terrible artist and no—one need ever know. Paint�*s ai assistant, cocreator, will take the most pathetic of drawings and use it as a guide to come up with something far more artistic. # dum—de—dum. # you can dial the amount of ai flamboyance up and down, but although your sketch gives you some control over the end result, it can still be pretty unpredictable. He laughs ok, i'll leave it as an exercise for the viewer to decide which is the most pressing issue. Is it the text in the tree or the trunk hanging out of the ear? these pcs will also add some pretty subtle ai tweaks to your camera app. Now, you know when you're on a video call and the other person's eyes are not quite looking at you because they're actually looking at their screen and not the webcam at the top here? well, this computer will raise your eyes up to make it look like you're maintaining eye contact with the other person. Now, the effect is really, really subtle, but maybe if i turn it on and off, you can see it artificially tweaking the top of my eyes. There it is. Off. . . . . On, off. It's so subtle and. . . . . Ever so slightly freaky. And then there's possibly the most far—reaching use of ai and large language models that i've seen so far. It's called recall. This is like a photographic memory for your pc. Every few seconds, it takes a screenshot of what you're doing, and if much later on, you vaguely remember something that you saw that you wanted to find again, you can describe it to the on—board assistants, and the large language model will go looking amongst all of the thousands of screenshots for things that might match. Now, i know what you're thinking. If your computer is recording everything that you do all the time. . . Alarm beeps. . Huge privacy alarms. Am i right? that is why microsoft is going to great lengths to reassure users that everything to do with recall stays on the device. Nothing goes anywhere near the cloud. You can also turn recall on and off for different websites, and this is also the reason why this feature is still being finalised and hasn't been rolled out yet, because this is one that microsoft has to get right. Google�*s launched a similar feature for its pixel phones. Here, you have to manually take a screenshot, after which it becomes searchable in the same way. Again, everything happens on device to keep everything private. In order to work well, ai needs to consume a lot of training data. I mean, in an idealworld, it would swallow everything about everyone, but that is something that people are starting to get worried about. I think these new onboard neural processing units are partly there to allay those concerns. They can't match the power of ai in the cloud, but they do allow certain ai functions without your data being shared with the rest of the world. And it means that your personal assistant can stay a little bit more personal. Crowdstrike is apologise at a committee about an outage which disabled millions of pcs. It for some hospitals to cancel appointments and delay operations. Knocked payment services off—line and a grounded flights. Irate services offline and a grounded flights. We are deeply sor and grounded flights. We are deeply sorry and we — grounded flights. We are deeply sorry and we are _ grounded flights. We are deeply sorry and we are determined grounded flights. We are deeply sorry and we are determined to | sorry and we are determined to prevent this from happening ever again. fix, prevent this from happening ever again— ever again. A ma'or international �* ever again. A major international study | ever again. A major international study suggests that has been a sharp rise in body because problematic social media use among young people since the pandemic. Research is on the health behaviour in school—aged children study severed almost 280,000 children aged 11, 13 and 15 across 3a countries. The report was make authors stable action is needed to promote healthy online behaviours. And james cameron, director of majorfilms director of major films including director of majorfilms including titanic and the terminator, hasjoined the board of artificial intelligence company stability ai. He says he has spent his career seeking out emerging technologies to push the very boundaries of what is possible. He went on to describe the intersection of generative ai and cti image creation as the nest way set to revolutionise filmmaking. —— wave. Now, we know the harm that some gases do to our planet. And whilst nature has its ways of clearing the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and more, it does it really slowly. So scientists have been trying to find ways to speed it up. And kevin keane's been finding out how. Some of the world's most fertile soils can be found around active volcanoes. When lava rapidly cools, it crystallises and forms solid rock. Over time, as the rock is broken down, it releases calcium, magnesium, and potassium into the soil, creating a nutrient—dense environment. And now, scientists at undo are working with farmers to spread the dust across their lands, where it not only acts as a fertiliser, but aims to capture tons of carbon. It's spread at no cost, paid for by carbon credits from big companies like microsoft and british airways. And ryan says it's an important contribution farmers can make to lowering their carbon footprint. So natural weathering is something that's been happening all around us for millions of years. Scientists estimate something like a billion tons of co2 a year is being removed from our atmosphere through that, and we're just asking the question of how can we speed that up? and the answer is by powderising the rocks. So just tell me in the most basic way how this works. So we are taking silica rocks and spreading them onto farm fields. So as it rains, the rain is pulling co2 out of the atmosphere, dissolving into the rainwater, into carbonic acid. And as that acid falls onto the field, it's reacting with the rock, breaking down the rock to form bicarbonates, stable compounds, which are then being washed out into river systems, out to the ocean, where it's locked up for geological time. So that's tens to hundreds of thousands of years. So what happens if the crushed rock is spread across the land to maximise its exposure to the elements? when it rains, there's a chemical reaction between the rock and the rainwater, which solidified the carbon and removes it from the atmosphere. We're early stages, so i don't know how efficient it is, but looking at the science and the data they've got, i think it will have long term benefits to their soil. How much do you think the agricultural industry feels perhaps unfairly targeted for its climate change emissions? and what do you think that this will do to help change that? i think farming has been looked at as a soft target, and maybe not that particularly good at defending itself as well, but food production must continue. It's the most important industry around, and i think using a product like this_ will surely have a positive benefit to everyone. How much of a game—changer is this in terms of locking carbon out of the atmosphere and into the ground? it's transformative. I think it's the most scalable technology. We have, you know, huge deposits of rock globally ready to go, and we have farmlands in every single continent. And all of that means that we could achieve, you know, billions of tonnes of removal on the very fast time scale for the climate. The team behind it say there's a huge supply of basalt available in quarries, which can be spread on farmland across scotland and beyond. They believe their magic dust can play a huge part in the rush to decarbonise our economy. Many of us lead hectic lives, dashing from one place to another. But whether you're at work in the supermarket or at home, have you ever really thought about how spaces are designed? welcome to a building within a building. At ucl�*s pearl lab, the way that people move and interact with their surroundings can be observed, measured and analysed under controlled conditions. The aim is to help create better real buildings as a result. Lighting, acoustics and even smells can be tweaked. Today's experiment is monitoring how people move through spaces in an art gallery situation, and with a few challenges thrown in, the decisions that they make along the way. As well as the 18 cameras that are monitoring the way that people move around the space, there are a lot of wearables, including this eeg device that's got 64 sensors on it. That's monitoring brain activity. And then over here, this eye—tracking device monitors your eye movements. It'll record them on the phone as well. So whatever you're looking at here will be seen on the device. And this is called the bright light frontal. It shines light into the head to see the blood flow to see if somebody is being stimulated by the things that they're seeing around them. It's this mixture of eyes, brains, and heart rates that will help architects and their designers plan the buildings of tomorrow. Neuro—architectu re is the concept of designing efficient environments based not only on technical parameters, ergonomics and environmentalfactors, but also on emotion, happiness and wellbeing. The aim is also to create more diverse environments, ones that are good for more people. Right now, designers try and come up with a building that will work well. But actually, to do that, you want to know about the people, how they feel, what's happening in their body. To really create the best possible buildings for a healthier society, a more sustainable future, we need that extra information. Buildings and how they're expected to be used are often planned with the help of a digital twin. That's a virtual model of them. These are data—hungry, but an important way of predicting issues before a brick is even laid. One of the things that we're aiming to do here today is to take — simulation to a next level, because simulation typically assumes that all humans are the same. We're able to kind of bring in what humans are good at, together with an ai tool that, for example, can treat large data sets and really identify things in it that we might not immediately be aware of. The participants today were from a mix of the worlds of architecture, transport, ai, property, video game design, dance, museums, bbc tech shows and more. We're being told there are no instructions. Just walk around, talk to people if you want to. Nobody seems to be talking to each other. There are also these envelopes. It says, open when instructed. I'm wanting to open it now. I want to be rebellious. But no, it might ruin it, i won't. I'm interested. You give people no instructions. They've all gathered there watching something. A couple of people go wandering off. I want to go and wander off there, for no particular purpose. Participant id 64. Order of screens to visit, starting top left and working down each column. What? i've got to visit all of those screens? ok, let's get started. Right, number 11 first. Hello, everybody. Well done. You've completed the task. That was fascinating in itself. Never mind the data that's being collected, but just to see the way that people behave. First of all, nobody spoke to each other. Then we started chatting a bit. Well, i started talking to people a bit. We were all quite relaxed. As soon as we had a task to do, it immediately got competitive and quite manic. And then going round in circles, you start to feel quite strange. I'm wondering how all of that came across in the measurements, especially for the people that were having their brains tracked. The findings will become part of a database that will be drawn on for years. But can anything be gleaned, a week on from the experiment? there were things where people did extra things we'd not expected. So one of those was to sort of break out of the space. And the tracking did extend to some extent. And i think that's telling us something interesting. Who decided to break the rules and who decided to stick within the bounds? people came up with, like, cognitive offloading on the day. They kind of used tools to help them remember things that we hadn't anticipated, which is what happens in real life. So it'll be interesting to see who does what and how predictable people are. Can you predict who's going to be, you know, naughty, or who's going to rigidly stick to the rules? this experiment marks the beginning of a journey of discovery. The architects and neuroscientists will continue to learn more from the data about how we interact with spaces in the real world, and this could eventually influence the design and feel of the places that we inhabit. And that's it from ucl�*s pearl lab. Thanks for watching. We'll be back next week. Bye— bye. Hello. On friday, we had some furtherflooding problems, causing disruption on some of our road and railway networks, particularly focused around parts of the midlands. This was how one of our flood—hit communities in warwickshire looked like, and we still have a number of flood warnings currently in force — again, tightly clustered around the midlands. And of course, it's here where we've seen extreme rainfall so far this month. The wettest place in woburn, bedfordshire, we've had overfour times the september average rainfall, we've had over four times the september average rainfall, well over three times the average rainfall in oxfordshire, and that's what's caused the flooding issues. Now, we have something of a quieter window of weather into saturday. Chilly north—westerly winds with us, yes, and a few showers draped around our coastal fringes. Many inland areas, dry, clear and cold. Yes, heading into the first part of saturday morning, in the countryside, temperatures well down into single figures, cold enough for a nip of frost into parts of scotland and northern england. So saturday, a very cold start to the day for september, but plenty of sunshine for most. The exception is scotland, where weak weather fronts will move in, bringing some thicker cloud and a few patches of light rain. And although there could be an odd shower for northern ireland, the northwest of both england and wales should be mostly dry here. And certainly fine for southern parts of wales, southern england, the midlands and eastern england. Lots of sunshine, but it will be another chilly day for this time of the year. Sunday, second half of the weekend is dominated by this next area of low pressure. It's going to be another cold morning, plenty of morning sunshine, but then it turns cloudier from the southwest. The winds start to pick up and it becomes very windy for wales and southwest england — gusts here reaching around 50 or 60 miles an hour. Through the afternoon, eventually, we'll start to see some rain getting into northern ireland, wales and western areas of england, leaving the north and east of the uk dry, with some hazy spells of sunshine. Through sunday night and into monday, that's when we'll see some of that rain falling on our flood—hit communities. One thing i would say is the rain isn't going to be as extreme as it has been, but clearly any extra rain is probably not going to be too helpful. A wet and windy day, then, for most of us on monday, and it will continue to be cool for the time of year — temperatures from around 12 in edinburgh to about 16 in london. Heading, then, into the first part of october — yeah, where has this year gone? — it looks like it should be dry but on the chilly side. Bye for now. Live from washington, this is bbc news. The israeli military strikes hezbollah�*s central headquarters in lebanon's capital, escalating tensions in the region. Us vice—president kamala harris delivers a speech at the southern border, outlining her plans on immigration. And tributes for the actress dame maggie smith, who's died at the age of 89. Hello, i'm helena humphrey. We start tonight in lebanon, where israeli warplanes have launched a second wave of attacks on buildings in beirut. It said it was targeting hezbollah weapons depots in the lebanese capital. Earlier on friday a series of explosions levelled a number of buildings. The israeli defense forces says it was targeting hezbollah�*s headquarters, in beirut�*s densely populated southern suburbs. Hezbollah�*s leader, hassan nasrallah, was reportedly the target of the explosions. Neither israel nor hezbollah has formally confirmed his status. At least six people died in the attack and more than 90 have been injured according to lebanese officals. The embassy of iran, which backs hezbollah, called the attack a dangerous, game—changing escalation. Our bbc teams on the ground describe the situation as chaos, with ambulances rushing to the scene