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    AI Companies Have Pitched US Political Campaigns. The Campaigns Are Wary.

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    More than 30 tech companies have pitched A.I. tools to political campaigns for November’s election. The campaigns have been wary.Sam WoodMatthew Diemer, a Democrat running for election in Ohio’s Seventh Congressional District, was approached by the artificial intelligence company Civox in January with a pitch: A.I.-backed voice technology that could make tens of thousands of personalized phone calls to voters using Mr. Diemer’s talking points and sense of humor.His campaign agreed to try out the technology. But it turned out that the only thing voters hated more than a robocall was an A.I.-backed one.While Civox’s A.I. program made almost 1,000 calls to voters in five minutes, nearly all of them hung up in the first few seconds when they heard a voice that described itself as an A.I. volunteer, Mr. Diemer said.“People just didn’t want to be on the phone, and they especially didn’t want to be on the phone when they heard they were talking to an A.I. program,” said the entrepreneur, who ran unsuccessfully in 2022 for the same seat he is seeking now. “Maybe people weren’t ready yet for this type of technology.”This was supposed to be the year of the A.I. election. Fueled by a proliferation of A.I. tools like chatbots and image generators, more than 30 tech companies have offered A.I. products to national, state and local U.S. political campaigns in recent months. The companies — mostly smaller firms such as BHuman, VoterVoice and Poll the People — make products that reorganize voter rolls and campaign emails, expand robocalls and create A.I.-generated likenesses of candidates that can meet and greet constituents virtually.But campaigns are largely not biting — and when they have, the technology has fallen flat. Only a handful of candidates are using A.I., and even fewer are willing to admit it, according to interviews with 23 tech companies and seven political campaigns. Three of the companies said campaigns agreed to buy their tech only if they could ensure that the public would never find out they had used A.I.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Aerosmith Retires From Touring, Citing Steven Tyler’s Vocal Injury

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      Last year, the band’s frontman, Steven Tyler, suffered a vocal injury during a show, and the farewell tour was postponed. The band announced its retirement on Friday, saying a full recovery was not possible.Aerosmith, the venerated American hard rock band whose hit records like “Dream On” have reverberated across the airwaves and in sweaty sold-out venues around the world for more than half a century, announced Friday that it was retiring from the tour stage, citing a permanent vocal injury to its star frontman, Steven Tyler.“He has spent months tirelessly working on getting his voice to where it was before his injury,” the band said in a statement on its website. “We’ve seen him struggling despite having the best medical team by his side. Sadly, it is clear, that a full recovery from his vocal injury is not possible. We have made a heartbreaking and difficult, but necessary, decision — as a band of brothers — to retire from the touring stage.”The band is only retiring from going on tour, Katie Altman, a representative, said. It is not breaking up. The announcement came ahead of the band’s “Peace Out” farewell tour, which had been set to begin in Pittsburgh on Sept. 20 and run through February at stops in the United States and in Canada, including a performance at Madison Square Garden in New York City on Feb. 23, 2025. The band’s final tour stop was scheduled for Buffalo on Feb 26.The tour had been postponed to later this year after Tyler, 76, hurt his vocal cords during the band’s Sept. 9, 2023, show at UBS Arena on Long Island. The band said that it had decided to postpone the tour until this year because the injury turned out to be more serious than initially thought and involved a fractured larynx in addition to the vocal cord damage.Fans who purchased tickets through Ticketmaster will receive automatic refunds, the band said. People who bought tickets via third-party sites were asked to contact those vendors. More

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      Meta in Talks to Use Voices of Judi Dench, Awkwafina and Others for A.I.

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      If deals are struck, Meta may incorporate the actors’ voices into a digital assistant product called MetaAI, people with knowledge of the effort said.Meta is in discussions with Awkwafina, Judi Dench and other actors and influencers for the right to incorporate their voices into a digital assistant product called MetaAI, according to three people with knowledge of the talks, as the company pushes to build more products that feature artificial intelligence.Apart from Ms. Dench and Awkwafina, Meta is in talks with the comedian Keegan-Michael Key and other celebrities, said the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because the discussions are private. They added that all of Hollywood’s top talent agencies were involved in negotiations with the tech giant.The talks remain fluid, and it is unclear which actors and influencers, if any, may sign on to the project, the people said. If the parties come to an agreement, Meta could pay millions of dollars in fees to the actors.A Meta spokesman declined to comment. The discussions were reported earlier by Bloomberg.Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, has invested heavily in artificial intelligence, which the biggest tech companies are racing to develop and lead. Meta has plowed billions into weaving the technology into its social networking apps and advertising business, including by creating artificially intelligent characters that could chat through text across its messaging apps.On Wednesday, Mark Zuckerberg, Meta’s chief executive, increased how much his company would spend on A.I. and other expenses this year to at least $37 billion, up from $30 billion at the beginning of 2024. Mr. Zuckerberg said he would rather build too fast “rather than too late” to prevent his competitors from gaining an edge in the A.I. race.One area of A.I. that is rapidly emerging are chatbots with voice abilities, which act as virtual assistants. In May, OpenAI, a leading A.I. company, unveiled a version of its ChatGPT chatbot that could receive and respond to voice commands, images and videos. It was part of a wider effort to combine conversational chatbots with voice assistants like the Google Assistant and Apple’s Siri.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Scarlett Johansson Said No, but OpenAI’s Virtual Assistant Sounds Just Like Her

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      Last week, the company released a chatbot with an option that sounded like the actress, who provided the voice of an A.I. system in the movie “Her.”Days before OpenAI demonstrated its new, flirty voice assistant last week, the actress Scarlett Johansson said, Sam Altman, the company’s chief executive, called her agent and asked that she consider licensing her voice for a virtual assistant.It was his second request to the actress in the past year, Ms. Johannson said in a statement on Monday, adding that the reply both times was no.Despite those refusals, Ms. Johansson said, OpenAI used a voice that sounded “eerily similar to mine.” She has hired a lawyer and asked OpenAI to stop using a voice it called “Sky.”OpenAI suspended its release of “Sky” over the weekend. The company said in a blog post on Sunday that “AI voices should not deliberately mimic a celebrity’s distinctive voice — Sky’s voice is not an imitation of Scarlett Johansson but belongs to a different professional actress using her own natural speaking voice.”For Ms. Johansson, the episode has been a surreal case of life-imitating art. In 2013, she provided the voice for an A.I. system in the Spike Jonze movie “Her.” The film told the story of a lonely introvert seduced by a virtual assistant named Samantha, a tragic commentary on the potential pitfalls of technology as it becomes more realistic.Last week, Mr. Altman appeared to nod to the similarity between OpenAI’s virtual assistant and the film in a post on X with the single word “her.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Mark Dodson, Voice of ‘Star Wars’ and ‘Gremlins’ Characters, Dies at 64

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      He voiced Salacious B. Crumb, the monkey-lizard pet of Jabba the Hutt in “Return of the Jedi,” as well as Mogwai in both “Gremlins” films.Mark Dodson, who voiced strange puppet creatures in “Star Wars,” including Salacious B. Crumb, the cackling monkey-lizard pet of Jabba the Hutt, and “Gremlins” films, died on Saturday. He was 64.His death was confirmed in statements on social media by his agent, Peter DeLorme, and the Evansville Horror Con, the Indiana fan convention where he had been scheduled to appear over the weekend. No cause of death was given.Mr. Dodson’s career began in 1983 on “Star Wars: Return of the Jedi,” when he voiced Salacious B. Crumb, the court jester of Jabba the Hutt that was known for its maniacal laugh.In a 2020 interview, Mr. Dodson explained how he had gotten the role by accident.He was auditioning for Adm. Ackbar, a leader during the Clone Wars, but was so nervous that he asked for a break to compose himself, and was overheard using a deranged voice that the casting director thought was perfect for Crumb.That led to Mr. Dodson to voice several of the Mogwai in “Gremlins,” the 1984 comedy-horror film about a young man who accidentally unleashes a horde of malevolently mischievous monsters on a small town on Christmas Eve.“Let’s say I did get Ackbar — I never would’ve gotten the ‘Gremlins,’” he said. “The ‘Gremlins’ came because the ‘Gremlins’ were made by the same guys who made Salacious. That’s why it came up, ‘They look a lot the same. Wouldn’t it be great for the Gremlins to have that same voice! Who is that guy?’”Mr. Dodson continued working in both franchises, voicing characters in the 1985 television movie “Ewoks: The Battle for Endor” and “Gremlins 2: The New Batch” in 1990.He voiced a scavenger in “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” (2015) and appeared as an uncredited zombie in George Romero’s “Day of the Dead” (1985).Mark Dodson was born on Feb. 1, 1960, in St. Louis, according to IMDb.He also voiced characters in several video games, including “Star Trek Online,” “Ghostrunner,” “Bendy and the Dark Revival,” and “Lego Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga,” once again as Crumb. More