this is noonoouri. she's a virtual character, an instagram influencer, and has worked with fashion brands and celebrities. and she's the brainchild ofjoerg zuber. well, noonoouri is a lifetime project for myself. i created her in my mind first — i did a little sketch of her. and so, this was the idea, the original idea of noonoouri. noonoouri's appearance has been created using computer generated 20 graphics and motion capture. it uses a lot of manpower, so we were, at this time, like, five people in my studio and we started, like, the hair, the drawings of the — of the fabric, the movement and everything and i slipped into a motion capture suit to walk as her to define her movements, her gestures and everything, but i couldn't find an investor. everybody said like, "no. "this is not really working. "we don't want to have digital things and nobody would listen "to a digital character." and the more nos i got, the stronger she grew. tell me about the record deal with warner and noonoouri. oh, my god, this is amazing! it's like — really like — it was accelerating my pulse when i got the emailfrom "warner music central europe," is writing me, and they were, like, asking me, "are you interested in music?" and i say, "well, what a question!" it's the first time a digital character has been officially on the label's roster. whenever it comes to appearances in metaverses, in gaming, when you want to experiment with motion capture technology and so on, noonoouri is a perfect fit here. you can appear in different places at the same time. you can change her style in a minute. we can make noonoouri fly if we want because it feels natural to her because she's already a digital character. so there are more opportunities than with a human artist in that respect. her voice has been created with the help of artificial intelligence, based onjoerg's own voice, meaning her sound is completely unique. they pitched it higher, of course, they made it more female but we didn't want to create, like, a human voice. we wanted to have it a bit like technology, like, a bit tech voicey. so, the base and the original voice of her is my voice. dance music plays. but to produce a melody, they brought in a real life singer. so, and there comes the moment where we used ai technology because the music from the singer — so, the voice from the singer — we needed to know when he was singing high, when he was singing low, when he was singing slower, when he'd get more speed, when he'd get more pressure. and this is the end result. # just a little push. # that's enough to start a chain reaction. # once i'm on a roll... al was only a small step in the creation of this song. producers and songwriters all over the globe contributed. # one by one, watch them fall. # like domi—dominoes. # domi—dominoes... like every new technology, ai brings with it immense opportunity but it also raises profound challenges for the creative community. it's about understanding about transparency. it's about knowing what content and what data ais have been trained on. it's about ensuring there's adequate labelling so we know whether or not a piece of music is ai—generated. but also there's questions about things like personality rights. so, at the moment, in the uk, personality rights aren't really properly protected. you can essentially generate an ai version of someone, of a pop star or a singer, and they wouldn't have any rights about how that how that is used. so, looking at how we can ensure the regulatory and legal framework around ai is used in a way that can enable human creativity, not erode it, is absolutely critical from our position in the music industry. some clubbers in berlin have mixed views. i don't think fully ai music is ever going to fully replace creativity but i think using it as a tool to enhance people's creativity and also to improve people's access to music, i think, can really be a positive thing. yeah, i think in terms- of music, it's kind of got two sides of it. for creatives, i think, although it's really. interesting innovation - and really exciting and really, really new and really, - really current, on the other hand, i think a lot of artists feel almost frightened - or threatened by the idea - of creating al to create music. the use of generative ai specifically has been stirring up controversy within the music industry but there's also a feeling that the technology is here to stay. youtube recently published its first set of ai music principles so that creators can use it responsibly. i think ai is going to change the way lots of industries operate. the music industry is no different. and actually, lots of people in the industry are quite excited about some of the opportunities. we sawjust a few weeks ago, paul mccartney talking about how they used al to isolate one of the stems ofjohn lennon's voice in one of the beatles�* songs. again, that's all being done with proper permissions, it's being done in quite an exciting way, so there are sort of huge opportunities. # 0h. # ohhh. clearly, the use of ai is becoming more mainstream, but now that it's officially entering the charts, will it ever get to number one? # one by one. # watch them fall. # like domi—dominoes. # domi—dominoes. right, from pop stars to ballet now. at the leipzig opera house, there is a show called fusion, which is the world's first ballet to be inspired by artificial intelligence. now, the team behind it used ai tools to generate images and sounds, and those were used to influence the choreography, the set design and the music. in fact, the creative director even asked chatgpt for ideas on how to stage the final performance. my name is harry yeff, i'm also known as reepsioo, and i'm an artist and director based in london. all of my work centres around new methods of exploring voice and technology. synthetic-sounding beatboxing. i grew up in quite a difficult environment. i wouldn't say that i had an unhappy childhood but it was definitely disorganised. my first love was actually tournament chess. it was playing chess. —— it was playing chess that showed me that creativity can come from any place. both my mum and dad are neurodivergent and i am diagnosed dyslexic and add and in school, that was tough, feeling like you're something else or put in a different category. but in my adult life, it's very much been a superpower. it was through chess that i was first introduced to ai. it's very normal to play with an engine. it never got tired. it never got bored. beatboxes something magic happened. i found a style that had never happened in the culture of beatbox before, and it got a lot of attention. i went on to become double national champion. bassy beatboxing so, i started to really explore. i started to think about what is possible and — with this unique ability that i have. but could ai allow something so human to evolve? so, over the last six years, i've moved a lot into direction and creative direction with technology and i was appointed as creative director of fusion, which is a collaboration with leipzig international ballet in germany, 35 international dancers. and the idea was, with mario schroder, who's the ballet director, to introduce a new tech process. but the whole story is really about how do we visualise tech? so, speaking with gpt—3, we were able to talk about this idea of different shapes and what shapes represent technology and eventually, using very simple applications through midjourney and dall—e with paul zoller started to visualise some of the earlier texts that we'd generated. so you started to see these new set pieces — a white tree floating over a stage, a large disk that is black and absolute with water — and these kind of visual hallucinations that came from these ai conversations, they were directly inspired by us and then, that directly inspired us. we took a lot of images and photos of — and recordings of the practice. and as mario started to develop the movement based on the narrative, we ended up with a data set and then, using stylegans to effectively generate interpretations of those images, like morphing, shifting, different movements which he then took inspiration from. he had these images and video that he would think, "this is an interesting emotion. "oh, the way that arm is is something i wouldn't "have thought of." so, again, this augmented creativity, this dialogue, was present for the movement. vocalises, then beatboxes there are huge opportunities to let these systems empower you and to take ownership over them and to learn about them, have ai literacy. beatboxes rapidly they have been a mentor, they've been a collaborator and even when they're an opponent, they help me grow. and for that — for now — i'm very, very grateful. beatboxes rapidly chuckling: 50 hard! time for a look at this week's tech news and a technical issue that led to widespread flight disruption this week was caused by incoming flight data, say uk air traffic control bosses. air traffic control services said a flight plan in systems could not process prompted the tech fault. google deep mind is trialling digital watermarks that can help to spot ai generated images that have been created with its image generator image in. this is in a bid to fight disinformation. tool id identifies images created by machines by embedding changes to individual pixels in the pictures. traditionally, watermarking has been more robust for content thatis, been more robust for content that is, you know, visual in nature than text but it still impertinent and robustness can mean many things.— impertinent and robustness can mean many things. scientists in sinu-aore mean many things. scientists in singapore have _ mean many things. scientists in singapore have developed - mean many things. scientists in singapore have developed a - mean many things. scientists in| singapore have developed a thin flexible battery that can power smart contact lenses. the battery, which stores electricity when immersed in saline solution, can be powered by human tears. according to its creators. and openai has launched an enterprise version of its popular chabad chatgpt for large businesses. the ai firm says data from enterprise customers's use of the software will not be used to train its models. companies all over the world are finding new ways to produce food for our growing population without putting as much pressure on animals or the environment. so, here comes lara with a new dairy alternative. say cheese! sustainability and animal welfare are at the heart of better dairy�*s mission, which is to create cheese in a lab using precision fermentation. one of the big challenges when it comes to dairy alternatives is recreating cheese in a way that you'd actually want to eat it by itself. and this london—based company is focusing on casein, an element that normally comes from cows, but they're using plant—based products. and the idea is that this, once it's perfected, can be used in any form of cheese to make a proper variety. casein is one of the main proteins found in milk and the one that gives it its white colour. it's also most of the protein found in cheese and it's what gives cheese its melt, stretch and flavour. casein has really exciting properties to it that allow these really intricate, complex cheese matrices to form, encapsulating fat, so that when you melt it, it flows. you know, capturing salt crystals, so that when you're biting a vintage cheddar, you taste that flavour. it's very complex. kate, what are you up to here? hi! well, just like you can grow yeast to make beer, we grow yeast to make caseins for cheese. so, here, i'mjust starting the small culture. this is going to go in the incubator and grow overnight. once the yeast has spent its night in the incubator and the scientists are happy with it, it moves on to this stage of the process. jacqueline, what are you doing here? so once we have the right tube, we're putting this small vessel in which we can control different temperatures, ph, aeration, and then we have the right conditions for the growth. once we have this, we move for a larger scale and then we keep growing to have more of our product, that is the caseins. and once the brew�*s ready, it's brought over to this machine where it's filtered and purified, and from there lots of data is collected on it to really be able to perfect the casein. meanwhile, here in the food science lab, cheese is being prototyped using casein. alex, what have you got going on here? so once we have our casein, we can reconstitute it into milk, from which point we can add rennet to it and coagulate those proteins into a curd. from there, we cut our curds, expelled the whey and the moisture from those curds, and then finally press them into a hard block of cheese. it looks like custard at the moment, but you're going to turn that into something that looks more like cheese? yes. so from this point, we've just taken our caseins, reconstituted it into milk, and then we've added rennet to the milk, which has coagulated all the proteins in there into one solid mass. now the issue is we need to get all of the water out of it to make a solid block of cheese. we do this by first cutting the curds and then slowly increasing the temperature, which drives that moisture out. finally, those curds are all combined back again and then put into a press. most of our processes are very traditional because of the nature of our protein. pressing the cheese overnight serves to expel any remaining moisture from the curd and also improves its final texture. it's time for the big moment — the tasting. this looks amazing, like regular cheese. but what's the difference in terms of ingredient? what isn't in this that you would normally get in cheese? so because we can use plant—based sugars, we can omit the lactose, which is obviously great for lactose intolerant people. yeah. and because we're using plant—based fats, we have really low cholesterol, so it's actually a much healthier cheese. that's a good start. which one shall i eat first? i would say go for this one. this is one of our mature cheddars. lovely. that tastes like mature cheddar. i want to have something more interesting to say, but it tastes right. let's try this one. what's that? that's gouda. 0k. the consistency of that looks good. it is a little bit crumblier. i feel like they break more easily than actual cheese. is that right? i would say so, but i think that's just through something that needs ironing out over time. right. tastes like gouda. i can tell it's a different cheese. they are a bit crumblier than regular cheese, that's the only difference that i can really point out. so it tasted pretty good. what happens when you try and melt it? they melt, yeah. they take on a slightly different flavour profile, like you'd expect from melted cheese, and they have more or less the exact same consistency. yeah, they taste different to most of the other cheese alternatives that i've had. a lot of the others have the wrong texture. this is the closest in texture, albeit a bit crumbly. most alternative cheeses you wouldn't want to be eating by themselves. these actually feel ok as pieces of cheese. mm. i'm going to eat a bit more, which is always a good sign. going have a bit more of that one. just have a bit more of a think about how it tastes. and...it�*s quite nice. ok, we'll leave lara to conduct some... coughs ..in—depth research there and we'll cross to nick kwek, who's been to a whisky distillery — i mean, honestly, the pair of them. nick's been finding out how technology is helping the whisky industry to move with the times. whisky is one of scotland's greatest exports, with sales soaring above £6 billion last year. producing the amber nectar takes a lot of energy, but the scotch whisky association has pledged to reach net zero emissions by 2040 across the board — five years sooner than the scottish government's goal. and this distillery here is set to achieve those targets with sustainability at its heart. today i'm on a whistle—stop tour of ardnamurchan, and the first port of call, the power source. so the dam does two things. it helps with cooling in the distillery, but it also feeds into a hydroelectric system which supplies renewable energy to help with the whisky making. it's also installed solar panels, and it's using a biomass boiler instead of oil for 100% of its heat. holy smokes! that's powered by local forestry, woodchips within ten miles of the distillery. so for every acre of woodland that's cut down to make the woodchip, there's replanting that's going on. water from a nearby natural spring goes into making the final drink, along with yeast and barley. but a lot of by—products are created. during the distilling process, an unwanted residue called pot ale forms. and after the mashing stage, spent barley grain — known as draff — is left behind. so each trailer will be filled every two days. it's mostly husk and leftover... oh, it's warm! it's warm from this morning. it can either be dried and added to the pot ale syrup, compressed then animal feed, or it can go directly to the estate and feed the cattle. you know, that is deliciously smelling for a... for a cow. i tell you, you put that in front of a cow, it would be very happy. not sure. it's estimated that about 500,000 tons of draff and around three billion tonnes of pot ale are produced each year by scottish whisky distilleries. so what if this waste could be turned into notjust feed or fertiliser but high value fuel? celtic renewables took some from ardnamurchan to prove its technology here at scotland's first biorefinery. so these act as, the raw materials for our bacteria, and they essentially grow on the organic matter that's in here, they break it down and they convert it into their end products. and their end products are highly valuable chemicals — acetone, butanol and ethanol — and right now you can only get them from fossil fuels. and you might think, "well, what's that got to do with me?" well, actually, it's found in everyday objects like lenses in glasses, remote controls, tablet screens, medication, soap, perfume, in decaf coffee to remove the caffeine from coffee, and different bacterial sprays — stuff we use all the time. there's plenty of carbon out there in biological residues, and that can be used to make the chemical products that we make, which directly replace the same chemicals made from oil and gas and things we have to dig up. martin's solution is based on bacteria, starting in this anaerobic chamber. i kind of liken it to a pot plant. you start with a seed and a small little plant, you let it grow a bit, then you put it into a bigger pot and then you put it into a bigger pot. and we are talking lots of pots. oh, my goodness me! wow! how big's this, martin? so this one, we can grow 5,000 litres' worth of bacteria. is this the end? no. there's one more to go. shall we go and take a look? absolutely. those are enormous. it's pretty amazing to think that what happens in the lab just a few feet away culminates here with these five gigantic vessels holding up to 500,000 litres of bacteria. finally, the mixture is fed into this distillation tower, which extracts the chemicals from the mixture. there's a lot of machinery and a lot going on here. our process is also an industrial process and requires energy and heat, but we do this in a way as sustainable as possible. we recycle the heat, we use sustainable energy. the offices are heated from the heat in the factory that's produced in the process as we go along. but is this the solution for a sustainable future? it's not us versus something else. it's all of them need to come together — wind, wave, tidal, whatever it is. we need to put all of these together if we're going to achieve it. that was nick, and that's it for this week. thanks so much for watching and we will see you soon. hello there. the first week of september is looking a lot more summery than what we had throughout most ofjuly and indeed august. this weekend, high pressure is building in. it will turn drier and sunnier and warmer across the board. however, there will be a fly in the ointment that comes with this area of low pressure in its weather from which will push close to the north—west of scotland at times, certainly on sunday. but high pressure is building in — it's killing off the showers, the clouds. early on saturday we should see any rain fizzling out, but there will be a legacy of clouds and mist and fog, particularly across central southern england, wales, northern ireland. here it's going to be mild, but again, the north—east corner of scotland will be quite chilly with temperatures in low single digits. so we start off, plenty of sunshine in the north. further south, mist and fog through the morning which will tend to lift and burn. into the afternoon, could see the odd isolated shower developing, but most places will stay dry and it'll feel a lot warmer for most — low to mid 20s across the board. as we head through saturday night again we'll see the mist and fog develop pretty much anywhere but especially across parts of england and wales. gradually, this weather front will start to push into the north—west of scotland to bring stronger winds, outbreaks of rain. a much milder night to come across north—east scotland, 13 degrees for aberdeen. and elsewhere, temperatures will be in double figures. sunday high pressure still with us, but this weather front will be influencing the weather across north—west scotland. so for the highlands and islands, it'll be quite cloudy, breezy with outbreaks of rain here. but southern and eastern scotland, northern ireland, england and wales, once any early mist and fog clears away, then it'll be a lovely, sunny, dry day. light winds for most quite gusty, though, for the north—west of scotland. temperature wise, for the highlands and islands, 15 to 17 degrees. but the rest of scotland, northern ireland, england and wales, it's the low to mid 20s. as we head into monday we hold on to this wetter, cloudier, breezier weather across north—west scotland. but the rest of scotland, northern ireland, england and wales again, once any morning mist and fog goes away, it'll be dry, sunny and very warm with temperatures ranging from 22 to 26 celsius. much warmer there for eastern scotland, too. and we hold on to those temperatures mid to maybe high 20s for england and wales. could see close to 30 degrees in one or two spots, otherwise they'll be turning more unsettled by the end of the week. this is going to go in the incubator and grow overnight. live from washington, this is bbc news. colourful and controversial businessman mohamed al—fayed dies at the age of 94. more members of the far—right group the proud boys receive hefty prison sentences for their roles in the january 6 us capitol riots. and with recent coups in gabon and niger, we take a closer look at the situation in the region. hello, i'm caitriona perry. you're very welcome. egyptian—born businessman and self—made billionaire mohamed al—fayed has died at the age of 94. the former harrods owner courted the establishment, befriended the royal family, and longed for british citizenship. his son dodi was killed alongside princess diana in paris in 1997. among other ventures, al—fayed used to own the fulham football club, which confirmed his passing to the bbc. daniela relph looks back now at al—fayed's life. mohammed al—fayed, once the proud owner of harrods, the world's most famous department store, who yearned to be part of the british establishment. born in egypt, he married the sister of billionaire arms dealer adnan khashoggi and built a business empire. he bought the ritz hotel in paris and defeated the monroe group in the battle to buy harrods.