lara: this week, we're taking a look back at some of our amazing adventures with al. spencer: now, how would you like to meet one - of the most popular and highest earning instagram models? well, you can't — because she doesn't exist. but we go behind the scenes with the team that created her. lara's sniffing around the scientists who are bringing historic smells back to life. so i guess ijust put my nose in here. and spencer looks at the latest ai features on phones and tablets. but are they top quality or a bit rubbish? he laughs. 0k, it got rid of the bin! and put another bin there. we'll also meet the actors who say their voices have

been manipulated by ai. phone rings. spencer: 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 them in one of these. that means that these chips can do some limited alon 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. gemini: 0k, 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 real time. i 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. shutter clicks. so if you want something removed from your shot, including, erm, you... ..well, you can tap it, erase it, and the phone will fill in the gap with a pretty good approximation approximation of the background. so now a few roadworks of the background. so now a few roadworks won't spoil your holiday snaps. won't spoil your holiday snaps. and a random photobomber and a random photobomber won't ruin that otherwise won't ruin that otherwise beautiful moment. beautiful moment. remember, though, generative ai remember, though, generative ai can have its moments, so don't can have its moments, so don't rely on it to understand rely on it to understand exactly what you're after. exactly what you're after.

he laughs. he laughs. 0k, it got rid of the bin... 0k, it got rid of the bin... ..and put another bin there. ..and put another bin there. as well as removing things, as well as removing things, you can also do completely you can also do completely the opposite, adding things the opposite, adding things in that weren't there in that weren't there in the first place. in the first place. it's notjust phones that it's notjust phones that are getting smarter, mind you. are getting smarter, mind you. this is the latest flamboyance up and down, this is the latest microsoft surface pro. microsoft surface pro. one of the new copilot+ one of the new copilot+ brand of pcs and tablets with onboard npus. brand of pcs and tablets now, this uses the in—built ai now, this uses the in—built ai in a number of ways. in a number of ways. first, would you believe good old microsoft paint has had a generative ai upgrade? a generative ai upgrade? now you can be a terrible now you can be a terrible artist and no—one artist and no—one need ever know. 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. humming: # dum de dum!#.

you can dial the amount of ai

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 the device to keep everything private. in order to work well, ai needs to consume a lot of training data. i mean, in an ideal world, it would swallow everything about everyone, but that is something that people are starting to get worried about.

and 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. joe tidy: a photo shoot with no model. she's not late, though. she doesn't exist. aitana is an ai model. since she was created around a year ago, she's amassed a big following and is making thousands a month for her ba rcelona—based agency. we intend to always try to make it as similar as what an influencer would do. we take a picture with me in the image and we have to replace it with al. so we have to play a little bit with lights and shadows to make it as real as possible.

as well as the main images, aitana's designers make short videos to post as her instagram stories. back in the studio, they plan the post. maybe barcelona as the background... background. ..is going to be more interesting. yeah. and if we want, we can do a simple prompt. now put aitana, and then complement all the prompts with more things like the clothes, the acting. clueless aigency won't say exactly which ai image generator they are using, but say they use a mixture of open source models like stable diffusion. sometimes it can throw up some surprises. and we train aitana with... chuckling. that's interesting that you laughed at that one. i thought i would never wear this, for example. right. that's why you laughed. so it's funny because it's like, "wow, "i would love her to wear this, "but she will not wear this." we spent like two months creating this personality and understanding how she would speak, how she would, like, interact

with her community. so this is why we believe she has been working, and she still works. once the image is chosen, the refinements and corrections are done. they start with seeing what photoshop�*s in—built ai suggests, then touch it up by hand. touch ups used to take around a day, but now it's a few hours because of how the ai has improved so much. a few days later, here's the final product. i love this. they've just given us a printout of the very, very early days of aitana's instagram, so she only had 3,800 followers. and these are the early pictures. and what's interesting is they hadn't quite got the face perfect. so aitana's face just changes slightly. the studio says they can get thousands of pounds a month for sponsored posts and endorsements with aitana.

she's now the most famous of this new wave of realistic looking ai models. and there are plenty of them — some with hundreds of thousands of followers as well. achieving realism in videos is proving harder, but aitana's team are experimenting, too. aitana also has an onlyfans style private membership for underwear and swimsuit shots. her virtual life is built for her mostly male fans, a key demographic for these ai models. some find the message they're sending to boys and girls troubling. we're seeing ai, artificial intelligence influencers and if you watch these, it is terrifying how real they are. danae mercer is a wellbeing influencer who calls out fakery on instagram. i see huge issues with the rise of ai models and influencers. i think they're setting an unrealistic beauty standard

that is close enough to being real, that a lot of people who follow them don't realise they're not real, especially teenagers, young teen girls. but then the perfection is so unachievable because it isn't real. that is something like none of us can ever reach. aitana is marketed as a fitness loving woman who lives a healthy lifestyle. she's even been sponsored by nutrition and sports brands. is there a problem where you're promoting a body image of someone that is, you know, in many ways perfect, but they don't exist? they don't go to the gym, they don't watch what they eat. and there are some people, some of your followers that say, "i wish i had that body." in the beginning, we tried to make more curvy models, for example, or more not standardised models, and clients didn't like that. they usually want, like, a perfect model. but you can see this everywhere in publicity. at the end of the day, she is an influencer, but comparing her to the rest of the influencers, she looks the same as the rest.

do you think that one day, we just won't need any more real—life influencers or models? i believe that we are here to stay and ai technology is here to stay as well. so in a way, we have to, like, combine and hold hands and see if we can do it together. one and five children aged between 8—17 have lied about their age to get a social media account. that's according to the uk media watchdog off calm. protecting children from harmful content would be a legal requirement once the uk's online safety act is enforced for next year. the social networks have introduced a number of measures to ensure that children can't access their platforms. this report suggests the problem has not yet been solved. scientists have been testing a robot which could help farmers assess the health of their soil faster.

normally they have to send samples away to be analysed, which is and expensive. rtu is a robot mounted with a gamma ray detector which measures levels of organic matter. the bot can scan a field within hours, which means that farmers can make more rapid and accurate decisions. finally, new data has shown that football players can improve their performance by up to 60% by training in the dark. sandhu afc has been trialing a light based training system from the sport tech company. it works by recalibrating the brain's visual processing pathways. a tech company stole our voices, made clones of them as ai clones, and sold them possibly hundreds of thousands of times. this is paul and linnea. voiceover actors based in new york city. last summer, they were in

the car listening to a podcast about the hollywood writers' strike and how it might affect vo artists like them when something strange happened. this specific episode, the host was going to interview an ai entity about the potential harm that ai will have on the entertainment industry. and he is interviewing my voice. how disturbing and terrifying that moment was is hard to articulate. i spent six hours on the internet that night searching as many text—to—speech products that i could find, and listening to all of the voices that they offered until i stumbled upon lovo. lovo are this company. a berkeley—based text—to—speech platform. just type what you want to hear... but once she started poking around the company site, linnea said she found an ai

voice that sounded just like paul. i mean, i was stunned. i couldn't believe it. and out of pure curiosity, i just started listening to the other voices, thinking, "maybe i'll recognise someone i know, "a colleague from the voiceover world." and that's when i stumbled upon my voice. so in may, paul and linnea filed a class action lawsuit against lovo, saying the company illegally stole their voices and identities without permission or proper compensation. the company has not yet filed a response. so in october of 2019, a freelancing site that i'm on where i regularly procure voiceover work reached out to me asking if i would record some scripts for them. the couple say the scripts were generic radio ads, ones the user said would never be broadcast, so they didn't need expensive usage rights. they were quite generic. you know, "do you need a dry cleaner in idaho? "we're here, right around the corner. "your. .. your neighbourhood dry cleaner." paul says about six months

later, he got a similar request to record dozens of generic sounding radio scripts. in messages the couple shared with the bbc, you can see the user appears to say the audio will be used for research into speech synthesis. paul follows up to clarify whether the audio will be used for anything other than their specific research. in the next message, the user then appears to confirm the audio will not be used for anything else. and then i asked, "will you be changing the order of my audio "or using it in any separate way?" and they said no. as for linnea, she says the users she spoke with deleted part of the conversation, but in the communications that remain, it appears the user presents the scripts as test radio ads, ones that will not be disclosed externally. the couple said there was no formal contract, just these messages they've shared with us. we can't, however, verify if these are the complete conversations. in both cases, though, the couple recorded the audio, sent the files and moved on. the voice you're hearing is tom lee, co—founder of lovo,

speaking on a business podcast about how their voice cloning technology works. we reached out to lovo on multiple occasions to request an interview with mr lee. we also asked for any correspondence or conversations they may have with paul and linnea. they did not respond to any of our messages. so what's going on in the voice actor cases are a field of law known as rights of publicity. the thing that's being copied is not a piece of copyrighted work, but a piece of someone's personality, right? and so then we get these personality rights or rights of publicity, where the allegation is not, "you copied my song," or "you copied my drawing," but rather,

"you copied my voice." the voices have since been removed from the company's website, but an ad still exists online where paul's supposed voice clone can be heard. so i sat down with the couple to take a listen myself. on video: introducing genny, by lovo. - artificial intelligence that makes it fast and easy i to create voiceovers - for marketing, e—learning, documentaries, animations, i games, audiobooks, and more. introducing genny, by lov0. artificial intelligence that makes it fast and easy to create voiceovers for marketing, e—learning, documentaries, animations, games, audiobooks and more. when we all thought of ai in the future, we thought ai is going to be folding our laundry and making us dinner. we didn't think ai is going to replace human beings' creative endeavours. this case is just one of many being brought against ai companies by artists who don't want to lose control over their work and livelihoods, and more are likely to come. we really have no other choice but to stand up and give our energy to this, because when companies develop technology that way,

it's not innovation any more, it'sjust exploitation. imagine if you could recreate any smell that you wanted. so, you could take yourself back to your youth, or you could even go back hundreds of years in time. well, that's just what they're doing here in this lab. hi, i'm lara. hi, i'm cecilia. nice to meet you, cecilia. nice to meet you, too. the smells that we all experience are a mixture of chemical compounds and our perception and memory. in this lab, they're trying to bring those things together. here on your computer, we've got a whole lot of types of reaction you could have to the smell, i guess. does everybody react in the same way? or do you think people have different ideas of what smells of ammonia? that is a very good question. we're not trained to talk about smells in the same way we are about visual arts, for example, or music. and therefore we have

to develop these vocabularies and train ourselves to know that when we say a word describing a smell, we mean the same thing. if only there was a nose machine to do all that hard work. so i guess ijust put my nose in here. yes. slightly sweet. delicate and sweet. there's almost something soothing about it. this is actually frankincense, a tree resin that's been used for thousands of years in religious ceremonies in the form of incense and in traditional medicine. i think my description was terrible. what do you think? i think you did very well. how about recreating smells from the past? ones that no longer exist or may never have existed just from the words used to describe them. one of the things we're really interested in is bringing back the smells of the past and presenting them to people, communicating these smells.

using ai, they're mining 60,000 historic texts and 13,000 images for references to smells, with some astonishing results. i have one more smell for you to experience today. thank you. oh, that's quite fierce. it's also quite bad. it smells of burning mixed with poo. ugh! absolutely revolting. quite frankly. no, that's awful. what is it? so this is the smell of hell. it's the smell of hell? yes. we don't have a recipe for this, obviously. so it was inspired bya painting. and in this painting, we see christ descending into limbo to save the souls that have gone to hell. and as he descends, we see a dragon blowing smoke and fire in his face. and there's the smokiness. there's also notes of sulphurous smells. ok, that's the bad bit. yes.

ifeel quite sick. then you'll have to make sure you go to heaven. yep. laughter. this is very true! lovely. thank you. well, all i can say is you've done an amazing job of creating this scent because it's absolutely horrendous! yep. it's been made using synthetic versions of compounds from faeces and rotten lilies. they've used it at museum ulm in germany, where the picture is on display, and this can enhance the visitor experience. yuck. the petrie museum of egyptology in london is also working with smells. as an archaeologist, how important is it to you that lots of museums would embrace this sort of technology to enhance the experience? well, that's a very good question. obviously, places like these, they are important resources. traditionally, in a museum, you can see the objects. you can be provided

with information. sometimes, if you're lucky, you may have sessions where you can touch — handling objects, depending. but what about smells? maybe we can be transported to a city, a village, the workshop of a person who's working leather or wood. or the kitchen — food, what people ate, how they did food. why is it so important to be able to recreate these smells? this is important because many of the smells that we focus on are at risk of disappearing. and when the aroma goes, it's not only the smell, but also the stories, the people, the places that are connected to them. so here we use different techniques to better understand and safeguard and preserve our cultural heritage. the world is changing and there soon could be a day with some of the smells we take for granted no longer with us, but thanks to projects like this, we may be able to reconnect with our emotional memories with just a sniff.

and that's all we've got time for. thank you for watching. we shall be back next week. bye— bye. hello. this is the weekend when november turns into december, but it's not going to feel like it weather—wise. in fact, it is going to feel very mild, often cloudy. there will be some rain, equally a little bit of sunshine. now, we've got a frontal system that has been pushing its way eastwards. behind that, a south—westerly flow, a very mild but moist south—westerly flow, so, yes, there will be a lot of clouds, some mist and murk in places, but this very mild air is working its way northwards across all parts of the uk.

so a mild start to saturday morning, but with a lot of cloud, some mist and murk, particularly for coasts and hills in the west, few spots of rain through the day, parts of northern england, northern ireland and scotland, equally a few brighter spells north—east wales, northeast england, north—east scotland, areas with some shelter from the breeze. but look at the temperatures 13—15 degrees, very mild indeed for the last day of november. it will be quite windy out there, those winds actually strengthening across western parts as we head into the evening ahead of the arrival of this frontal system that will push its way eastwards overnight. bit of showery rain running ahead of that. so, some outbreaks of rain through the early hours of sunday morning. again, it's going to be really very mild, temperatures holding up in double digits for most as we head into the second half of the weekend. so here goes our frontal system, pushing its way eastwards during sunday. that is going to bring some outbreaks of rain. sunday, probably the wetter of the two weekend days for england and wales, as these outbreaks of rain push eastwards.

scotland and northern ireland seeing sunny spells and showers, that brighter but showery regime spreading to most areas before sunday afternoon is done. still very mild, 12—14 degrees. but we will see a bit of a change as we move out of sunday and into monday. we do start to pick up these northerly winds, which for a time, will bring something colder southwards across the uk, but that is unlikely to last all that long. we see frontal systems returning from the atlantic. from midweek onwards, things will turn milder, but they will also turn quite a lot more unsettled, with some wet and potentially very windy weather to end the week. so next week looks like this, briefly turning a bit colder, milder again later, but more unsettled.

live from washington, this is bbc news. rebel forces in syria launch their biggest offensive in years amid heavy fighting near the city of aleppo. protesters take to the streets of georgia's capital for a second night over the government suspending moves to join the eu. the british parliament backs proposals to allow

terminally ill adults in england and wales the right to end their own lives. plus, 5.5 years after being ravaged by fire, paris's notre dame cathedral emerges from the ashes. hello. i'm helena humphrey. a battle is raging for control of syria's main northern city, aleppo. islamist rebels are on their third day of a lightning offensive, reportedly taking dozens of villages in the area. monitoring group the syrian observatory for human rights says half of aleppo is now under rebel control. a civil war has been grinding on since government forces put down pro—democracy protests in 2011. in the city of idlib, which is an opposition stronghold, people set off fireworks to celebrate the advance of rebel groups. syria and russia launched intense air strikes on the city

and other areas controlled by the islamist group,