Hundreds of people have attended an AI-generated church service in Germany, involving virtual avatars delivering sermons written by ChatGPT. The 40-minute service at Saint Paul’s church in Fürth received mixed reactions from the Protestant congregation, the Associated Press reported, with the avatars occasionally causing unintentional laughter. Some church members even refused to speak along when the digital avatar read out the Lord’s Prayer. “There was no heart and no soul,” said Heiderose Schmidt, a 54-year-old IT worker who attended the service. “The avatars showed no emotions at all, had no body language and were talking so fast and monotonously that it was very hard for me to concentrate on what they said. But maybe it is different for the younger generation who grew up with all of this.” Lutheran pastor Marc Jansen was more impressed by the artificial intelligence, saying he had “imagined it to be worse” than it was. “I was positively surprised how well it worked,” he said. “Also, the language of the AI worked well, even though it was still a bit bumpy at times.” The AI began the service by stating: “Dear friends, it is an honour for me to stand here and preach to you as the first artificial intelligence at this year’s convention of Protestants in Germany.” It went on to talk about leaving the past behind and never losing trust in Jesus, while also urging the congregation to overcome their fear of death. More than 300 people attended the service, which was organised by 29-year-old theologian Jonas Simmerlein from the University of Vienna. Mr Simmerlein instructed ChatGPT to include psalms, prayers and a blessing, saying the experiment was designed to show how religious leaders could use AI to help them with their work. “Artificial intelligence will increasingly take over our lives, in all its facets. And that’s why it’s useful to learn to deal with it,” he said, adding that AI will not be able to replace the role pastors serve in interacting with the local community. “The pastor is in the congregation, she lives with them, she buries the people, she knows them from the beginning. Artificial intelligence cannot do that. It does not know the congregation.” Read More What is superintelligence? How AI could wipe out humanity – and why the boss of ChatGPT is doomsday prepping 10 ways AI will change the world – from curing cancer to wiping out humanity Major Google Bard update allows it to not just write code, but execute it Instagram is working on an AI chatbot with multiple personalities The glaring omission from Apple’s AR headset launch

The headquarters of Twitter was left with a sign saying “ER” after San Francisco Police interrupted the physical rebrand of the social media platform’s offices. The new name, “X”, was later projected onto the building as night fell. The operation to take down the old sign was put on hold on Monday afternoon after Mr Musk didn’t obtain the correct permits for the crane that had been placed on the street, blocking traffic, according to a witness. “Welp, @twitter name so coming off the building right now but @elonmusk didn’t get permit for the equipment on the street so @SFPD is shutting it down,” Wayne Sutton tweeted from the scene. A San Francisco Police Department spokesperson told The Daily Beast that they had responded to “a report of a possible unpermitted street closure. Through their investigation officers were able to determine that no crime was committed, and this incident was not a police matter”. The name change has led to the social media platform dropping in value by between $4bn and $20bn, according to Bloomberg. The move has also been mocked as uninspired. “The old Twitter logo was open, accessible, instantly recognisable around the world. This new one looks like the logo of a seedy suburban strip club. Devoid of colour, bland, generic... BORING! This is branding suicide!” CM Kosemen wrote. “Taking one of the most recognizable brand names in the world and changing it to X is unfathomably dumb. Sounds like a porn site and the logo looks like the emblem to a bad Call of Duty gamebattles team from 2008,” YouTuber Charlie White wrote. “Gonna be honest this new widget design looks like an app for a membership-only human trafficking gentlemen’s club headquartered in Budapest,” one user said. “Musk doesn’t have the money or the staff to meaningfully update or even fix Twitter, so he’s making the cheapest, smallest tweak he can – literally swapping out a GIF file - that grabs the biggest headlines. It’s nothing but a cheap, meaningless play to get his name in the press,” comedian Adam Conover added. Mr Musk wrote on Sunday about wanting “a good enough X logo,” prompting his supporters to offer their suggestions. Sawyer Merritt posted several, with Mr Musk choosing one of them, saying: “Going with minimalist art deco on the upper right. Probably changes later, certainly will be refined.” The new logo is very similar to a generic Unicode character, which is an international symbol that would be impossible to trademark, the founder of Bellingcat, Eliot Higgins, noted. Meta, the operator of X competitor Threads, and Microsoft both own versions of the X symbol, which could possibly lead to legal disputes. “Twitter Japan apparently legally cannot change their rebranding to ‘X Japan’ because the Jrock band X JAPAN owns the rights to the name. How funny would it be if Yoshiki is the one who saves us all from this awful rebranding move? LOL,” one user noted. “I’m not a [copyright] lawyer but I think he should have figured out if he owned the name before changing it,” Vanity Fair special correspondent Molly Jong-Fast wrote. “Twitter was acquired by X Corp both to ensure freedom of speech and as an accelerant for X, the everything app,” Mr Musk wrote on Monday. “This is not simply a company renaming itself, but doing the same thing. The Twitter name made sense when it was just 140 character messages going back and forth – like birds tweeting – but now you can post almost anything, including several hours of video.” Mr Musk claimed that users would soon have the “ability to conduct your entire financial world” on the app. “The Twitter name does not make sense in that context, so we must bid adieu to the bird,” he said. Mr Musk has reportedly been fond of the letter X for decades, co-founding an online bank called x.com in 1999, which later merged and grew into what is now PayPal. Read More Elon Musk’s ‘X’ already trademarked by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta for ‘social networking services’ TikTok launches text-only posts as social media innovation race heats up Twitter to X: Why Elon Musk rebranded the social networking platform Elon Musk’s ‘X’ is already trademarked by Mark Zuckerberg Twitter to X: Why Elon Musk rebranded the social networking platform Twitter rebrands to X as Elon Musk loses iconic bird logo

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug 2, 2023--

A three-person tribunal has recommended against the firing of a Georgia teacher who is at risk of being terminated after reading a book about gender identity to her fifth grade class, according to the teacher's attorney.

Elon Musk on Wednesday launched his own artificial intelligence company, xAI, as he seeks to compete with OpenAI, the creator of ChatGPT -- a program he accuses of...

Union Square Park descended into chaos and soon turned violent as fans gathered to catch a glimpse of Kai Cenat

SAVE 75%: New and returning subscribers can score their first three months of Disney+ Basic

DALLAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jul 27, 2023--

The Proscenic L40 smart lever lock assembly ($129.99) lets you use a fingerprint scanner, a

Ron DeSantis’s long-anticipated 2024 campaign bid for the White House on Twitter Spaces was marred by a host of glitches that gave his political rivals enough ammunition to mock the Florida governor. Long silences and persistent echoes marred Mr DeSantis’s Wednesday announcement that he made on Twitter’s audio group-chat feature with billionaire Elon Musk who has long boasted about several overhauls to the social media platform to make it better than it was under previous leadership. The Twitter feature is a way in which users can gather in a “space” and have live audio conversations, with anyone in a space being allowed to “join, listen, and speak”, as per the website. At one point of time, the controversial Republican governor himself disappeared from the audio-only livestream. The Twitter app repeatedly crashed for users who tuned in for the announcement. Tech investor David Sacks, who was roped in to introduce the event, reportedly remarked that “the servers are melting”. When the former military officer-turned-politician finally managed to speak – about 20 minutes after the scheduled start – Mr Musk shut the initial Spaces event and started a new one. “That was insane, sorry,” said the Tesla billionaire. The buggy start to Mr DeSantis’s bid for the top job was dismissed by several Twitter users as a “disaster”. “Great start to his campaign!” said one sarcastic tweet. The second Spaces event kickstarted by Mr Musk, where Mr DeSantis read a short speech, seems to have attracted about 161,000 users, Twitter’s public-facing data revealed. Mr Sacks, however, claimed the number of attendees was one of the platform’s largest. He claimed that the glitches were an indication of people flooding Twitter, eager for Mr DeSantis’s entry into the presidential race. “We got so many people here that we are kind of melting the servers, which is a good sign,” Mr Sacks said in the first livestream. But this assessment was met with derision by former Twitter employee Earnest Wilkins, who helped produce the Twitter’s Spaces feature. “Lol this isn’t in the top 150 spaces by size in the history of the product,” he tweeted. Mr Sacks’s claim was also mocked by Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who said her non-campaign-related Twitch stream of her playing Among Us in 2020 attracted more people. “There was so much enthusiasm for Governor DeSantis’ vision for our Great American Comeback that he literally busted up the internet,” tweeted Mr DeSantis’s press secretary, adding that the event raised “$1 million” for the the campaign in one hour. The Wednesday event, according to many users on the platform, is a reflection of how Twitter under Mr Musk is far from operating smoothly. “Holy f***ing shit, Ron DeSantis’s campaign launch crashed and burned faster than a Tesla,” said one tweet. Since the Tesla titan laid off nearly three-fourths of Twitter’s workforce after taking over the social media company, the platform has been mired with technical issues. Users have faced frequent outages and bugs that have surfaced frequently and inconvenienced them. Several users earlier this week flagged a bug that caused some of their deleted tweets from the past to resurface on their timelines and, weeks before that, many were unable to tweet with the platform mistakenly stating they went over “the daily limit for sending tweets”. In March, many users also reported problems with posting images and sharing external links, with the Tesla chief himself noting that the platform “is so brittle”. The embarrassing tech glitches in Mr Musk’s platform were mocked by Mr DeSantis’s rivals on both sides of the political spectrum. They have also likely become a source of embarrassment for the Tesla chief, who had previously proclaimed that he prefers “to stay out of politics”. Donald Trump, the current Republican frontrunner for president, gleefully dubbed the event Mr DeSantis’s “failure to launch”. Joe Biden’s official Twitter account also jumped in and tweeted a link to Mr Biden’s own fundraising page, saying, “This link works”. Mr DeSantis’s campaign launch was widely anticipated, with many Republicans viewing him as a contender against Mr Trump. His controversial policies as Florida governor, including moves to restrict transgender and abortion rights, and backing a law that restricts classroom instruction on race and racism, led to him amassing a following in the American far right. The NAACP and Equality Florida have issued travel advisories to the state, warning that it is no longer safe for Black people or for those from the LGBT+ community. Read More Ron DeSantis news – live: Elon Musk’s Twitter Spaces crashes ruining Florida governor’s 2024 campaign launch Trump and DeSantis' rivalry intensifies as Florida governor formally enters 2024 presidential race Elon Musk complains about David Duke comparison during disastrous DeSantis 2024 launch event Ivanka and Jared split over attending Trump 2024 launch – follow live Why was Donald Trump impeached twice during his first term? Four big lies Trump told during his 2024 presidential announcement

LOUISVILLE, Ky.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Aug 3, 2023--

Smartwatch brand Noise is in talks for its first-ever fundraising round, as it competes for the top spot