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Comedian Eric Idle says performers ‘ought to protect ourselves' from AI fakes

Comedian Eric Idle says performers ‘ought to protect ourselves' from AI fakes

Rhyl Journal5 days ago
The 82-year-old comedian told the PA news agency his wife was particularly worried about what could happen to his image once he dies.
He told PA: 'I think it is a very interesting point, and we ought to have protected ourselves by copyrighting our images, I know my wife is very concerned about that.
'She's going to copyright my image, I won't be there, so I don't really give a…'
The rise of AI has seen numerous fake videos appearing to feature well-known celebrities on social media, while other incidents have seen their work digitally recreated.
Last year, Hollywood actress Scarlett Johansson said she was 'shocked' and 'angered' at how 'eerily similar' one of the voices on AI platform ChatGPT sounded to hers.
In response, the platform's operator OpenAI said it will 'pause' the use of one of the voices.
Idle said the technology is 'actually not bad' at copying work by old artists such as The Beatles to make a new version, but he felt it could 'only copy' and not create.
He added: 'I was with Professor Brian (Cox), the other night, and he asked it to write a Python sketch, and it was shit, completely unfunny.
'It mentioned a few things which obviously it picked up from Python, but it couldn't put them together in a new and funny manner, and I think that's the weakness with AI.
'I think Stephen Fry says you could ask it to do your World War One story, it could tell you how many bullets were used and how many people were killed, and all what happened every day, but it couldn't tell you as much as a Wilfred Owen poem could tell you in one minute or two, or 14 lines.
'I don't think that it makes much difference with a lot of American television because it's just churned out.
'But I think it can't be Robin Williams. I think it can't be Billy Connolly, I think it can't be Spike Milligan, I think it can't be the really creative comedians.
'So I don't think it can come up with that because what they do, they're doing it out of their own personalities.'
The comedian will return to the UK in September for a solo tour at venues including London's Royal Albert Hall, Birmingham Symphony Hall and Glasgow's Armadillo.
He will pay tribute to late friends George Harrison, Williams and Neil Innes, and perform with a virtual band.
He is best known for his appearances in the Monty Python's Flying Circus TV series alongside Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Jones, Michael Palin and Terry Gilliam, and its spin-off films Monty Python And The Holy Grail (1975), Life Of Brian (1979) and The Meaning Of Life (1983).
Idle also created Beatles parody band The Rutles with the Bonzo Dog Doo-Dah Band's Innes, which featured in two mockumentaries in All You Need Is Cash (1978) and The Rutles 2: Can't Buy Me Lunch (2003).
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'I tried McDonald's in Italy and the differences blew my mind'
'I tried McDonald's in Italy and the differences blew my mind'

Daily Mirror

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  • Daily Mirror

'I tried McDonald's in Italy and the differences blew my mind'

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Games Inbox: Why has the Nintendo Switch 2 been so successful?
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Games Inbox: Why has the Nintendo Switch 2 been so successful?

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Pity the censor: Moderation, by Elaine Castillo, reviewed
Pity the censor: Moderation, by Elaine Castillo, reviewed

Spectator

time6 hours ago

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Pity the censor: Moderation, by Elaine Castillo, reviewed

After her America is Not the Heart was published in 2018, Elaine Castillo was named by the Financial Times one of 'the planet's 30 most exciting young people', alongside Billie Eilish and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. That debut novel told the story of three generations of women torn between the Philippines and the United States. In Moderation, thirtysomething Filipina-American Girlie Delmundo (not her real name) works as a content moderator, removing the most hideous material to be found on the internet. The author doesn't pull her punches. In an early scene, Girlie has to moderate a video of child sexual abuse as part of her final assessment to get the job. (Another candidate passes his assessment, even though he throws up during it because, crucially, he doesn't pause the video.) She is asked to explain how she knows it is a young girl in the footage and not a consenting adult. The details are hard to stomach. Castillo has said that her two main characters (one of whom is Girlie) don't realise they are in a 'Jane Austen-style Regency romance'. In fairness, I'm not sure I clocked this either, at least in the first half, when a love story is barely mentioned and the pages are so muddy it is genuinely hard to persevere. In the second half, however, when Girlie starts to fall for an English co-worker, a sort of fluency develops. Good at her job, Girlie is offered a large pay raise by her company to moderate virtual reality theme parks. The frequency of rape in these environments becomes horribly numbing, at least for the reader. We are led to understand that Girlie has long been desensitised. The reasons for this are hinted at when we learn that she 'had known since she was seven what it looked like when she turned a man on'. Castillo has important things to say about the internet, trauma and true connection, but it's a shame that this novel wasn't polished to make it clearer or more enjoyable to read.

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