Latest news with #Human
USA Today
19 minutes ago
- Entertainment
- USA Today
Who won Netflix's 'Building The Band\
Spoiler alert: The following contains details from Episode 10 of "Building the Band." Netflix's experimental music competition show, "Building The Band," has named its first winning group. In the Episode 10 finale, which dropped Wednesday, July 23, girl group 3Quency won the celebrity judges' favor and earned the title of winners for "Building The Band" Season 1. The group, comprising Nori Royale, Wennely Quezada, and Brianna Mazzola, took home the $500,000 prize. "They have proven to us that they are ready. (They are) a band that has shown so much growth, the band that pulled out all the stops tonight," Nicole Scherzinger said. The women edged out fellow finalists SZN4 – Donzell Taggart, Aaliyah Rose, Cameron Goode, and Katie Roeder – the show's only mixed-gender group, which was a gamble in a competition that saw dozens of 20-somethings eager to form girl groups and boy bands. 3Quency's win comes after judges Scherzinger, Kelly Rowland, and the late Liam Payne voted off Iconyx (also known as Soulidified), thus advancing 3Quency and SZN4. The trio's final song was Mariah Carey's "Always Be My Baby." The win proved Rowland wrong in her prediction halfway through the episode that SZN4 would earn the title after they brought host AJ McLean and the judges to tears with their rendition of Rag'n'Bone Man's "Human." The Season 1 groups that were also formed in the sound booths but didn't make it to the finale were Midnight Til Morning, Siren Society, and Sweet Seduction. 'We're amazing dancers, obviously': Liam Payne pokes fun at One Direction on 'Building The Band' Liam Payne draws parallels between Iconyx and One Direction Payne, who came from a boy band background as one-fifth of "The X-Factor" success story One Direction, was the subject of much fangirling from the contestants. After Iconyx failed to make it to the final performance, he was eager to comfort the four-piece boy band backstage. "I'm just going to start here. One Direction came third," Payne said of the record-breaking group's fate on the U.K. music competition show. "I've been stood exactly where you guys are, and I thought it was over. I thought it was done, that was the end of One Direction," he continued. "It was not. But I believe in you guys." "Building The Band," Payne's last TV appearance, was taped in September 2024, just weeks before his death. The 31-year-old singer died Oct. 16 after falling from a third-floor balcony at a Buenos Aires hotel.
The Irish Sun
12 hours ago
- Entertainment
- The Irish Sun
Huge new ITV reality show packed with celebs TANKS in ratings – and is beaten by rerun of Death in Paradise
AMBITIOUS new reality show Shark! Celebrity Infested Waters has tanked in the ratings. Advertisement 5 ITV's Shark! Celebrity Infested Waters has tanked in the ratings (pictured: Rachel Riley) Credit: Getty 5 Helen George is among the celebs braving man-eating animals in the waters off Bimini Island in the Bahamas Credit: Shutterstock Editorial 5 Only 1.5m tuned in to watch the show's launch last week (pictured: Rachel Riley) Credit: Shutterstock Editorial But a peak of only 1.5m tuned in to watch the show's launch last week and then it scraped 1m on Monday. Instead of July 14th's launch, more viewers - ironically - watched a rerun of Death In Paradise from series 11, which first aired in 2021. The BBC's repeat of And BBC2's stroll through the evolution of man, Human, attracted 1.6m. Advertisement read more on itv Shark! fared no better this week either, when double - 2m - tuned in to BBC1's Fake or Fortune? antiques show. Both weeks, the most watched show of the evening was Coronation Street, with 3.3m and 3m watching respectively. It comes after In the five-part show, seven brave celebrities spent several weeks taking to dangerous waters in an effort to overcome their fears and also deliver an ecological message. Advertisement Most read in News TV The line-up also included comedians Ross Noble and Lucy Punch as well as McFly star Dougie Poynter and athlete Ade Adepitan. In the early episodes viewers have watched Helen battle with her fear of the sea after a childhood incident at an aqua park left her scared of even entering the water. Shark! Celebrity Infested Waters The actress, who plays Trixie in Call The Midwife, found even being lowered into the depths in a cage too much and begged to be released. Mum-of-two Helen, 41, said: 'I was terrified of putting my head underwater. Advertisement 'I have a real deep-rooted fear. 'My kids know that I am scared of the water, and my seven-year-old is more confident in the water than I am, and I realised I've got to do something about that as it's not safe.' ITV say after seven days the first episode has now been watched by 2.8m viewers and the series has been popular with 25-54 year olds. 5 The series has seen Helen battle with her fear of the sea after a childhood incident left her scared of even entering the water Credit: Shutterstock Editorial Advertisement 5 Helen found being lowered into the depths in a cage too much and begged to be released Credit: Shutterstock Editorial Unlock even more award-winning articles as The Sun launches brand new membership programme - Sun Club.
Scottish Sun
12 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Scottish Sun
Huge new ITV reality show packed with celebs TANKS in ratings – and is beaten by rerun of Death in Paradise
Click to share on X/Twitter (Opens in new window) Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window) AMBITIOUS new reality show Shark! Celebrity Infested Waters has tanked in the ratings. The ITV programme sees stars including Helen George, Rachel Riley and Sir Lenny Henry brave man-eating animals in the waters off Bimini Island in the Bahamas. Sign up for the Entertainment newsletter Sign up 5 ITV's Shark! Celebrity Infested Waters has tanked in the ratings (pictured: Rachel Riley) Credit: Getty 5 Helen George is among the celebs braving man-eating animals in the waters off Bimini Island in the Bahamas Credit: Shutterstock Editorial 5 Only 1.5m tuned in to watch the show's launch last week (pictured: Rachel Riley) Credit: Shutterstock Editorial But a peak of only 1.5m tuned in to watch the show's launch last week and then it scraped 1m on Monday. Instead of July 14th's launch, more viewers - ironically - watched a rerun of Death In Paradise from series 11, which first aired in 2021. The BBC's repeat of Ralf Little's gentle crime drama drew in 1.8m during the same 9pm to 10pm time slot. And BBC2's stroll through the evolution of man, Human, attracted 1.6m. Shark! fared no better this week either, when double - 2m - tuned in to BBC1's Fake or Fortune? antiques show. Both weeks, the most watched show of the evening was Coronation Street, with 3.3m and 3m watching respectively. It comes after David Tennant's gameshow The Genius Game was branded an "expensive flop" after the £2.5m series drew an average audience of 661,000 by the end. In the five-part show, seven brave celebrities spent several weeks taking to dangerous waters in an effort to overcome their fears and also deliver an ecological message. The line-up also included comedians Ross Noble and Lucy Punch as well as McFly star Dougie Poynter and athlete Ade Adepitan. In the early episodes viewers have watched Helen battle with her fear of the sea after a childhood incident at an aqua park left her scared of even entering the water. Shark! Celebrity Infested Waters The actress, who plays Trixie in Call The Midwife, found even being lowered into the depths in a cage too much and begged to be released. Mum-of-two Helen, 41, said: 'I was terrified of putting my head underwater. 'I have a real deep-rooted fear. 'My kids know that I am scared of the water, and my seven-year-old is more confident in the water than I am, and I realised I've got to do something about that as it's not safe.' ITV say after seven days the first episode has now been watched by 2.8m viewers and the series has been popular with 25-54 year olds. 5 The series has seen Helen battle with her fear of the sea after a childhood incident left her scared of even entering the water Credit: Shutterstock Editorial 5 Helen found being lowered into the depths in a cage too much and begged to be released Credit: Shutterstock Editorial Unlock even more award-winning articles as The Sun launches brand new membership programme - Sun Club.
Newsweek
17 hours ago
- Business
- Newsweek
AI Impact Awards 2025: Meet the 'Best Of' Winners
Newsweek AI is in beta. Translations may contain inaccuracies—please refer to the original content. Newsweek announced its inaugural AI Impact Awards last month, recognizing 38 companies for tackling everyday problems with innovative solutions. Winners were announced across 13 categories, including Best of—Most Innovative AI Technology or Service, which highlighted some of the most outstanding cross-industry advancements in the practical use of machine learning. Among the five recipients in the Best Of category is Ex-Human, a digital platform that allows users to create customizable AI humans to interact with. Ex-Human took home the Extraordinary Impact in AI Human Interactivity or Collaboration award. Artem Rodichev, the founder and CEO of Ex-Human, told Newsweek that he started his company in response to the growing loneliness epidemic. According to the U.S. Surgeon General, some 30 percent of U.S. adults experience feelings of loneliness once a week. Those figures are even higher in young Americans. Roughly 80 percent of Gen Z report feeling lonely. The epidemic is also keeping college kids up at night, and studies show that a lack of connection can lead to negative health outcomes. To help bridge that gap, Rodichev sought to create empathetic characters, or what he described as "non-boring AI." "If you chat with ChatGPT, it doesn't feel like you are chatting with your friend," Rodichev said. "You feel more like you're chatting with Mr. Wikipedia. The responses are informative, but they're boring." What his company wanted to create, instead, was "AI that can feel, that can love, that can hate, that can feel emotions and can connect on an emotional level with users," Rodichev said. He cited the 1982 sci-fi classic Blade Runner and the Oscar-nominated film Her as two main forms of inspiration. AI Impact Awards: Best of Most Innovative AI Impact Awards: Best of Most Innovative Newsweek Illustration Trained on millions of real conversations, Ex-Human enables companies to create personalized AI companions that can strengthen digital connections between those characters and human users. Internal data suggests Ex-Human's technology is working. Their users spend an average of 90 minutes per day interacting with their AI companions, exchanging over 600 messages per week on average. "At any moment, a user can decide, 'It's boring to chat with a character. I'll go check my Instagram feed. I'll watch this funny TikTok video.' But for some reason, they stay," Rodichev said. "They stay and continue to chat with these companions." "A lot of these people struggle with social connections. They don't have a lot of friends and they have social anxiety," he said. "By chatting with these companions, they can reduce the social anxiety, they can improve their mental health. Because these kind of fake companions, they act as social trainers. They never judge you, they're available to you 24/7, you can discuss any fears, everything that you have in your head in a no-judgment environment." Ex-Human projects that it will have 10 million users by early next year. The company has also raised over $3.7 million from investors, including venture capitalist firm Andreessen Horowitz. Rodichev said while Ex-Human's AIs have been popular among young people, he foresees it becoming more popular among the elderly—another population that often suffers from loneliness—as AI adoption becomes more widespread. He also anticipated that Ex-Human would be a popular technology for companies with big IP portfolios, like Disney, whose popular characters may be "heavily underutilized" in the age of AI. Also among this year's "Best Of" winners is a developer-focused platform that allows users to create AI-generated audio, video and images. was the recipient of this year's Extraordinary Impact in General Purpose AI Tool or Service award. Co-founder Gorkem Yurtseven told Newsweek that the award was particularly meaningful to him "because it recognizes generative media as its own market and sector that is very promising and growing really fast." is almost exclusively focused on B2B, selling AI media tools to help other companies generate audio, video and images for their business. Essentially a "building block," the AI allows different clients to have unique experiences, Yurtseven explained. So far, the biggest categories for are advertising and marketing, and retail and e-commerce. "AI-generated ads are a very clear product-market fit. You can create unlimited versions of the same ad and test it to understand which ones perform better than the others. The cost of creation also goes down to zero," Yurtseven said. In the retail space, he said has commonly been used for product photography. His company's capabilities allow businesses to display products on diverse background or in various settings, and to even build experiences where customers are pictured wearing the items. Yurtseven believes that in some ways, he and his co-founder, Burkay Gur, got lucky. When large language models (LLM) started to gain steam, many thought the market for image and video models was too small. "Turns out, they were wrong," Yurtseven chuckled. "The market is very big, and now, everyone understands it." "We were able to ride the LLM AI wave, in a sense," he said. "People got excited about AI. It was, in the beginning, mostly LLMs. But image and media models got included into that as well, and you were able to tap into the AI budgets of different companies that were created because of the general AI wave." The one sector that he's waiting to embrace AI-generated audio, images and videos is social media. Yurtseven said this could be on an existing app or a completely new platform, but so far, "a true social media app, at the largest scale, hasn't been able to utilize this in a fun and engaging way." "I think it's going to be very interesting once someone figures that out," he said. "There's a lot of interesting and creative ways people are using this in smaller circles, but it hasn't reached a big social network where it becomes a daily part of our lives, similar to how Snapchat stories or Instagram stories became. So, I'm still expecting that's going to happen." There's no doubt that AI continues to evolve at a rapid pace, but initiatives to address AI's potential dangers and ethical concerns haven't quite matched that speed. The winner of this year's Extraordinary Impact in AI Transparency or Responsibility award is EY, which created a responsible AI framework compliant with one of the most comprehensive AI regulations to date: the European Union's Artificial Intelligence Act, which took effect on August 1, 2024. Joe Depa, EY's global chief innovation officer, told Newsweek that developing the framework was a natural next step for EY, a global professional services company with 400,000 employees that does everything from consulting to tax to assurance to strategy and transactions. "If you think about what that is, it's a lot of data," Depa said. "And when I think about data, one of the most important components around data right now is responsible AI." As a company operating in 150 countries worldwide, EY has seen firsthand how each country approaches AI differently. While some have more restrictive policies, others have almost none around responsible AI. This means there's no real "playbook" for what works and what doesn't work, Depa said. "It used to be that there was policy that you could follow. The policymakers would set policy, and then you could follow that policy," he said. "In this case, the speed of technology and the speed of AI and the rate of technology and pace of technology evolution is creating an environment where we have to be much more proactive about the way that we integrate responsible AI into everything we do, until the policy makers can catch up." "Now, it's incumbent upon leaders, and in particular, leaders that have technology prowess and have data sets to make sure that responsible AI is integrated into everything we do," Depa said. As part of their framework, EY teams at the company implemented firm-wide AI definitions that would promote consistency and clarity across all business functions. So far, their clients have been excited about the framework, Depa said. "At EY, trust is everything that we do for our clients," he said. "We want to be a trusted brand that they can they can trust with their data—their tax data, the ability to assure that the data from our insurance business and then hopefully help them lead through this transformation." "We're really proud of the award. We're excited for it. It confirms our approach, it confirms our understanding, and it confirms some of the core values that we have at EY," Depa said. As part of Newsweek's AI Impact Awards, Pharebio and Axon were also recognized in the Best of—Most Innovative AI Technology or Service category. Pharebio received the Extraordinary Impact in AI Innovation award, while Axon received the Extraordinary Impact in Commercial Tool or Service Award. To see the full list of winners and awards, visit the official page for Newsweek's AI Impact Awards.
Scotsman
2 days ago
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Human BBC: who is the presenter on BBC Two?
Human is a five-part series that is airing on BBC Two 📺 Sign up to our daily newsletter Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to Edinburgh News, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... Human charts 'our incredible story across 300,000 years'. The show examines how we went from being just one of many types of human to the dominant form of life on the planet. But who is the presenter and where have you seen her before? The curtain is being lifted on the epic story of humanity in a brand new BBC series. It charts our species first emergence through to becoming the sole humans on earth across 300,000 years. Based on breakthroughs in DNA technology and remarkable fossil evidence, the show explains how the lives of our ancestors shaped who we are today. It also explores the stories of the other human species - like Neanderthals - and the role we played in their demise. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Human continues with another brand new episode tonight (July 21) at 9pm on BBC Two. The full series is also available to watch on iPlayer right now. Who presents Human on BBC? Paleoanthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi presents Human on BBC Two | BBC Studios The five-part documentary series is presented by paleoanthropologist Ella Al-Shamahi. The academic is also described as an explorer and has worked as a writer as well as a stand-up comic. Speaking about Human, Ella said: 'I hope they see how absolutely remarkable and unlikely our story is – it boggles my mind and it takes my breath away and I hope they feel the same way. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad Human is a five-part series on BBC Two | BBC 'I hope they feel something too – we went to the ends of the Earth to tell this story, we wanted to walk in our ancestors' footprints and honestly the ancients sometimes made that easy for us. At one point we went to one of the most exciting sites in the Americas – the actual footprints of what is likely a mother and child, in New Mexico. 'They are probably amongst the very first Americans – you can see from the pressure in the footprints that at times she picks the child up, sometimes on the right hip, sometimes on the left. To get to see snapshots in time like this it's so emotive… and human.' What has Human's presenter done before? Ella Al-Shamahi might not yet be the kind of household name that someone like David Attenborough or Brain Cox are - but she has had plenty of presenting experience prior to Human. She was the host of Neanderthals - Meet Your Ancestors in 2018. Prior to this BBC Two series, Ella's most recent presenting gig was with Channel 4's What Killed the Whale? It explored why whales wash up and die on UK beaches every year. If you love TV, check out our Screen Babble podcast to get the latest in TV and film.
