June 3, 2024: Today we're covering how to ban mentholated tobacco products, strange like-charge attractions in chemistry and what ScarJo's battle against a genAI chatbot voice means for the rest of us. —Robin Lloyd, Contributing Editor | | | Scarlett Johansson's recent win against an AI-generated chatbot voice that strongly resembled her own voice is raising concerns about privacy protections and digital uses of an individual's voice. (The chatbot voice reportedly was not Johansson's.) Existing laws tend to protect artists, performers and other creative professionals. It's unclear whether stronger privacy regulations pertaining to all of us might hold other unintended consequences, such as infringing on laws that protect the creation of parodies, reports Nicola Jones. For now, OpenAI, which suspended its Johansson-like voice, has not released to the public its generative artificial intelligence (genAI) software for cloning an individual's voice.
Why this matters: "We have a case about a person who won against a literal robot already," says legal analyst Meredith Rose. As AI continues to evolve, such cases will become "increasingly bananas."
Solutions: Tech approaches under development to protect an individual's voice from genAI uses could include "ways to watermark real audio at the time of recording and tools for detecting genAI-produced audio," Jones writes. | | | Scarlett Johansson has said she believes an OpenAI chatbot voice was intended to imitate her. Samir Hussein/WireImage | | | Opposites attract, but chemists have long noted occasional strange violations of this electromagnetic rule in the case of particles dissolved in a liquid. A new study suggests that similarly charged particles can attract one another depending on the molecular behavior of the solvent. The findings clear up a long-standing dispute about whether these observed attractions were real or a result of optical distortions, hydrodynamics or weak particle attractions. How it works: In water, for example, when negatively charged silica particles approach one another, they attract protons (which have a positive charge) to their surfaces, a process called charge regulation. That regulation weakens the repulsion between the particles as well as their repulsion from the negative charge of one side of water (H-2-O) molecules. These changes draw the like-charged particles closer to one another, forming hexagonal clusters, reports science journalist Lori Youmshajekian.
What the experts say: "This paper solves a mystery that has been out there for 20-plus years. It's very thorough, and I think [it's] indisputable that this effect is a property of the solvent," says chemist Jay T. Groves | | | • The tobacco industry has found ways to circumvent bans on menthol, a chemical additive to cigarettes that yields a cooling sensation, writes a team of researchers including green engineering professor Julie B. Zimmerman and Paul T. Anastos, who is widely regarded as the "father of green chemistry." Rather than banning all chemicals that can achieve the same sensation, the team recommends a "property-based approach." Like a ban in Belgium, this approach would restrict any tobacco-product additive that causes a cooling or pain-reducing sensation, or that otherwise makes it easier to inhale or take in such products. | 5 min read | | | Google now has widely released "AI-generated overviews" that appear at the top of search-engine results. However, in my case, I am searching for an index of credibly sourced information on some topic or question. I am not searching for an AI-generated overview, which I admit, in my mind, I translate to anything from "er, no thanks" to "garbage." Of course, one can scroll past this potentially flawed overview to scan for more reliable search results. But there are also some tech workarounds. Check out the section "is there a way to turn off Google Search AI Overviews" in this recent CNET story. | We always like to hear from you. Let us know what you think of AI-generated voices, AI-generated overviews in your search results or other sci-tech on your mind these days: newsletters@sciam.com. | —Robin Lloyd, Contributing Editor | | Subscribe to this and all of our newsletters . | | | | Scientific American
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