TOGETHER WITH

Good morning, human brains. Welcome back to your daily munch of AI news.

Here’s what’s on the menu today:

• ChatGPT takes us to church 🙏

  4 AI avatars lead a church service in Germany.

• World’s first AI in government 🌎

  Romania appoints an AI, “ION”, as a government advisor.

• AI for “Final” Beatles record? 🎸

  Paul McCartney uses AI to extract John Lennon’s voice for their last song.

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APPETIZER

AI Church service 🙏

4 AI avatars powered by ChatGPT led a church service during the German Protestant convention.

The chatbot guided over 300 believers through a 40-minute spiritual journey with prayers, hymns, sermons, and blessings.

Holy, holy, holy.

Jonas Simmerlein, a philosopher and theologian from the University of Vienna, led this AI service and said that 98% of the material was created “by the machine.“

Reactions were… mixed.

54-year-old IT worker Heiderose Schmidt said, “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.“

31-year-old pastor Marc Jansen said, “I had actually imagined it to be worse. But I was positively surprised how well it worked.”

Our take: Technology and spirituality don’t always mix. But if emotion and more authentic human speech is the missing gap, it may just be a matter of time before we see regular AI appearances as part of religious services.

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BUZZWORD OF THE DAY

MAIN COURSE

AI in the Romanian government 🏛️

Romania’s Prime Minister Nicolae Ciuca announced a new AI government adviser.

Name? “ION.”

Purpose? Understand citizens' opinions on critical issues and policies.

ION interacts with users on its website and scours social media to identify trending topics and conduct sentiment analysis.

So, how exactly will ION assist the Romanian government?

Nicu Sebe, ION’s research coordinator, says Ion won’t dictate decisions — instead it serves to offer advice and monitor citizens’ opinions.

However, there’s criticism. Some have voiced concern about over-representing a vocal minority, since part of what Ion ingests is scraped from social media.

Kris Shrishak from the Irish Council for Civil Liberties stressed that ION should be only used for feedback on current policies, not future ones to mitigate risk.

Our take: As AI breaks another world-first in government, it’s now even more important to refrain from automated decision-making (ADM). And the question still remains: how to develop systems that accurately represent the common good? Romania’s first — who’s next?

A LITTLE SOMETHING EXTRA

A Beatles song, courtesy of AI 🎶

Sir Paul McCartney used AI to aid in creating what he calls, "the final Beatles record."

AI allowed McCartney’s team to restore John Lennon's voice from an old demo to complete the song.

Glad he didn’t just — “Let It Be” ;)

The hurdle? Lennon recorded the 1978 piece “Now And Then” into a boombox in his apartment.

Lo-fi.

But after extraction and purification from its original cassette tape, the audio was clear enough to be mixed into the record as normal.

Our take: The process feels close to digitally restoring old black-and-white films. What other musical gems can we remaster with AI, and — who gets the royalties?

MEMES FOR DESSERT

YOUR DAILY MUNCH

Startup News

OpenAI, DeepMind, and Anthropic provide the UK early access to their AI models. The purpose? Research for safety and evaluation.

LlamaIndex raises $8.5M in funding with Greylock as lead investor. The platform connects LLMs and private data.

Research

A HuggingFace blog about ChatGPT’s and OpenAI’s leaderboard: GPT-4’s reliability, calibration, and why it prefers models that output more tokens per response.

A paper on detecting AI-generated content with over 99% accuracy. Includes tools and methods to detect AI content.

Tools

LoopGenius - Grow your business the easy way using AI-powered marketing loops. [Sponsor]

Jetpack.AI - A WordPress AI writing and content creation tool.

TWEET OF THE DAY

An AI-generated video of an Italian version of Harry Potter:

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Until next time 🤖😋🧠