Instagram is working on an AI chatbot with 30 different personalities for users to interact with, according to leaks. App researcher Alessandro Paluzzi shared screenshots of the ‘Chat with an AI’ feature, revealing details of an artificial intelligence agent similar to ChatGPT. It offers users the option to ask questions and seek advice, as well as a writing assistance tool for help with composing messages. “Bring AI to your chats for a more fun and engaging experience,” the leaked images of the ‘Chat with an AI’ feature states. “Chat with 30 AI personalities and find which one you like the best.” It is not yet clear when Instagram plans to release the AI chatbot, if at all. The Independent has reached out to Instagram for comment, though the company typically does not speak about unreleased products. Several other social media platforms have already launched similar AI tools, or are rumoured to be working on them. In February, Snapchat unveiled its ‘My AI’ chatbot, which is powered by OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology. The tool can be used to “answer a burning trivia question, offer advice on the perfect gift for your BFF’s birthday, help plan a hiking trip for a long weekend, or suggest what to make for dinner”, according to Snapchat. It was met with skepticism from some users, who reported on social media that they felt uncomfortable sharing their data with the AI chatbot. “I want it gone, remove it,” one user wrote in response to Snapchat’s tweet about the feature, while another asked: “Can we have the option to delete it.” TikTok is also currently testing an in-app chatbot called Tako, which has seen a limited roll out in a few select countries like the Philippines. “Being at the forefront of innovation is core to building the TikTok experience, and we’re always exploring new technologies that add value to our community,” a TikTok spokesperson said. “In select markets, we’re testing new ways to power search and discovery on TikTok, and we look forward to learning from our community as we continue to create a safe place that entertains, inspires creativity and drives culture.” Read More ChatGPT creator says AI ‘superintelligence’ is impossible to stop Meta Ireland to cut about 490 jobs Ukrainian schoolboy to buy home for his mother after selling Minecraft server Here’s what it’s like to use Apple’s new virtual reality headset

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Meta has created a new system that it says can generate convincing speech in a variety of styles – but will not release it for fear of the risks. The new tool is called “Voicebox” and can be set to create outputs in different styles, new voices from scratch as well as with a sample. It makes speech across six languages, as well as a variety of other tools such as noise removal. It says that it is a major development on previous speech systems that required specific training for each task. Instead, Voicebox can just be given raw audio and a transcription, and then be used to modify an audio sample. It is far more effective than its competitors, Meta claimed in its announcement. It can generate words with a 5.9 per cent error rate compared to 1.9 per cent from competitor Vall-E, for instance, and do so as much as 20 times more quickly. Meta said that it had been built on the foundation of a new model it called “Flow Matching”. That allows the system to learn from speech that has not been carefully labelled, so that it can be trained on more and more diverse data. Voicebox was trained on 50,000 hours of speech and transcripts that came from public domain audiobooks in English, French, Spanish, German, Polish, and Portuguese, Meta said. Now that it has been trained, it can be given an audio recording and fill in the speech from the context, Meta said. That could be used to create a realistic sounding voice from just two seconds of speech, for instance, potentially being used to bring voices to people who cannot speak or to add people’s voices into games. It could also be used to translate a passage of speech from one lanagueg to another in a way that keeps the style, Meta said, allowing people to talk to each other authentically even if they don’t speak the same language. It could also be useful in more technical scenarios, such as audio editing, where it can be used to replace words that were not properly recorded, for instance. But Meta said that the risks were such that it would not be releasing the model. It did not point to specific harms, but said that “as with other powerful new AI innovations, we recognize that this technology brings the potential for misuse and unintended harm”. Numerous reports have warned that such systems could be used to copy people’s voices without their consent and in ways that could be harmful, such as creating fake videos of news events or using people’s voices to pose as them during scam calls, for instance. “There are many exciting use cases for generative speech models, but because of the potential risks of misuse, we are not making the Voicebox model or code publicly available at this time,” Meta said in a statement. “While we believe it is important to be open with the AI community and to share our research to advance the state of the art in AI, it’s also necessary to strike the right balance between openness with responsibility.” It also pointed to a separate paper, published on its website, in which it detailed how it had built a “highly effective” system that can distinguish between authentic speech and audio that had been generated with Voicebox. Read More Mark Zuckerberg reveals what he thinks about Apple’s headset – and it’s not good Meta scrambles to fix Instagram algorithm connecting ‘vast paedophile network’ Reddit user’s protests against the site’s rules have taken an even more bizarre turn

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