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An ailing astronaut returned to Earth with three others on Thursday, ending their space station mission more than a month early in NASAs first medical evacuation. SpaceX guided the capsule to a middle-of-the-night splashdown in the Pacific near San Diego, less than 11 hours after the astronauts exited the International Space Station. Their first stop was a hospital for an overnight stay. Obviously, we took this action (early return) because it was a serious medical condition, NASA’s new administrator Jared Isaacman said following splashdown. The astronaut in question is fine right now, in good spirits and going through the proper medical checks. It was an unexpected finish to a mission that began in August and left the orbiting lab with only one American and two Russians on board. NASA and SpaceX said they would try to move up the launch of a fresh crew of four; liftoff is currently targeted for mid-February. NASA’s Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke were joined on the return by Japans Kimiya Yui and Russias Oleg Platonov. Officials have refused to identify the astronaut who developed the health problem last week or explain what happened, citing medical privacy. While the astronaut was stable in orbit, NASA wanted them back on Earth as soon as possible to receive proper care and diagnostic testing. The entry and splashdown required no special changes or accommodations, officials said, and the recovery ship had its usual allotment of medical experts on board. The astronauts emerged from the capsule, one by one, within an hour of splashdown. They were helped onto reclining cots and then whisked away for standard medical checks, waving to the cameras. Isaacman monitored the action from Mission Control in Houston, along with the crew’s families. NASA decided a few days ago to take the entire crew straight to a San Diego-area hospital following splashdown and even practiced helicopter runs there from the recovery ship. The astronaut in question will receive in-depth medical checks before flying with the rest of the crew back to Houston on Friday, assuming everyone is well enough. Platonovs return to Moscow was unclear. NASA stressed repeatedly over the past week that this was not an emergency. The astronaut fell sick or was injured on Jan. 7, prompting NASA to call off the next days spacewalk by Cardman and Fincke, and ultimately resulting in the early return. It was the first time NASA cut short a spaceflight for medical reasons. The Russians had done so decades ago. Spacewalk preparations did not lead to the medical situation, Isaacman noted, but for anything else, it would be very premature to draw any conclusions or close any doors at this point. It’s unknown whether the same thing could have happened on Earth, he added. The space station has gotten by with three astronauts before, sometimes even with just two. NASA said it will be unable to perform a spacewalk, even for an emergency, until the arrival of the next crew, which has two Americans, one French and one Russian astronaut. Isaacman said it’s too soon to know whether the launch of station reinforcements will take priority over the agency’s first moonshot with astronauts in more than a half-century. The moon rocket moves to the pad this weekend at Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, with a fueling test to be conducted by early next month. Until all that is completed, a launch date cannot be confirmed; the earliest the moon flyaround could take off is Feb. 6. For now, NASA is working in parallel on both missions, with limited overlap of personnel, according to Isaacman. If it comes down to a point in time to where we have to deconflict between two human spaceflight missions, that is a very good probMARCIA DUNN AP Aerospace Writerem to have at NASA, he told reporters. ___ The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institutes Department of Science Education and the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The AP is solely responsible for all content. Marcia Dunn, AP aerospace writer
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I was born an only child, but now I have a twin. Hes an exact duplicate of medown to my clothing, my home, my facial expressions, and even my voice. I built him with AI, and I can make him say whatever I want. Hes so convincing that he could fool my own mother. Heres how I built himand what AI digital twins mean for the future of people. Deepfake yourself From the moment generative AI was born, criminals started using it to trick people. Deepfakes were one of the first widespread uses of the tech. Today, theyre a scourge to celebrities and even everyday teenagers, and a massive problem for anyone interested in the truth. As criminals were leveraging deepfakes to scam and blackmail people, though, a set of white-hat companies started quietly putting similar digital cloning technologies to use for good. Want to record a training video for your team, and then change a few words without needing to reshoot the whole thing? Want to turn your 400-page Stranger Things fanfic into an audiobook without spending 10 hours of your life reading it aloud? Digital cloning tech has you covered. You basically deepfake yourselfcloning your likeness, your voice, or bothand then mobilize your resulting digital twin to create mountains of content just as easily as youd prompt ChatGPT or Claude. I wanted to try the tech out for myself. So I fired up todays best AI cloning tools and made Digital Toma perfect digital copy of myself. Hear me out I decided to start by cloning my voice. A persons voice feels like an especially intimate, personal thing. Think back on a loved one youve lost. Ill bet you can remember exactly how they sounded. You can probably even remember a specific, impactful conversation you had with them. Cloning a voicewith all the nuance of accent, speaking style, pitch, and breathis also a tough technical challenge. People are fast to forgive crappy video, chalking up errors or glitchiness in deepfakes to a spotty internet connection or an old webcam. Content creators everywhere produce bad video every day without any help from AI! A bad AI voice sounds way creepier, though. Its easier to land in the uncanny valley unless every aspect of a voice clone is perfect. To avoid that fate, I turned to ElevenLabs. The company has been around since 2022 but has exploded in popularity over the last year, with its valuation doubling to more than $6.6 billion. ElevenLabs excels at handling audioif youve listened to an AI-narrated audiobook, interacted with a speaking character in a video game, or heard sound effects in a TV show or movie, its a good bet youve inadvertently experienced ElevenLabs tech. To clone my own voice, I shelled out $22 for a Creator account. I then uploaded about 90 minutes of recordings from my YouTube channel to the ElevenLabs interface. The company says you can create a professional voice clone with as little as 30 minutes of audio. You can even create a basic clone with just 10 seconds of speech. ElevenLabs makes you record a consent clip in order to ensure that youre not trying to deepfake a third party. In a few hours, my professional voice clone was ready. Using it is shockingly easy. ElevenLabs provides an interface that looks a lot like ChatGPT. You enter what you want your clone to say, press a button, and in seconds, your digital twin voice speaks the exact words you typed out. I had my digital twin record an audio update about this article for my Fast Company editor. He described it as terrifyingly realistic. Then, I sent a clip to my mom. She responded, It would have fooled me. In my natural habitat I was extremely impressed with the voice clone. I could use it right away to spin up an entire AI-generated podcast, prank my friends, or maybe even hack into my bank. But I didnt just want a voice. I wanted a full Digital Tom that I could bend to my will. For the next stage in my cloning experiment, I turned to Synthesia. I originally met Synthesias CEO Victor Riparbelli in 2019 at a photo industry event, when his company was a scrappy startup. Today, its worth $4 billion. Synthesia specializes in creating digital Avatarsessentially video clones of a real person. Just as with ElevenLabs, you can type text into an interface and get back a video of your avatar reading it aloud, complete with realistic facial expressions and lip movement. I started a Synthesia trial account and set about creating my personal avatar. Synthesia asked for access to my webcam, and then recorded me reading a preset script off the screen for about 10 minutes. A day later, my avatar was ready. It was a perfect digital clone of my likeness, right down to the shirt I was wearing on the day I made it and my (overly long) winter haircut. It even placed me in my natural habitat: my comfy, cluttered home office. As with my voice clone, I could type in any text I could imagine, and in about 10 minutes I would receive a video of Digital Tom reading it aloud. Synthesia even duplicated the minutiae of my presenting style, right down to my smile and tendency to look to the camera every few seconds when reading a script from the screen. If I recorded a video with Digital Tom for my YouTube channel, Im certain most users would have no idea its a fake. The value of people My experiment shows that todays AI cloning technology is extremely impressive. I could easily create mountains of audio content with my clone from ElevenLabs, or create an entire social media channel with my Digital Tom as the star. The bigger question, though, is why Id want to. Sure, there are tons of good use cases for working with a digital twin. Again, Synthesia specializes in creating corporate training videos. Companies can rapidly create specialized teaching materials without renting a studio, hiring a videographer, and shooting countless takes of a talking head in front of a green screen. They can also edit them by altering a few written wordsfor example, if a product feature changes subtly. For their part, ElevenLabs does a brisk business in audiobooks and customer service agents. But they also provide helpful services, like creating accessible, read-aloud versions of web pages for visually impaired users. But my experiment convinced me that there are fewer good reasons to work with your digital twin. In an internet landscape where anyone can spin up a thousand-page website in a few minutes using Gemini, and compelling videos are a dime a dozen, thanks to Sora, content is cheap. There are not many good ways left for users to sort the wheat from the chaff. Personality is one of the few remaining ones. People like to follow people. For creators, developing a personal relationship with your audience is the best way to keep them consuming your content, instead of cheaper (and often better) AI alternatives. Compromising that by shoving an undisclosed digital twin in their face, however convincing it might be, seems like the fastest possible way to ruin that relationship. People want to hear from the meat-based Thomas Smith, even if the artificial intelligence version never forgets a word or gets interrupted by his chickens mid-video. I could see using one of ElevenLabs or Synthesias built-in characters to create (fully disclosed) content. But I cant see putting my digital twins to real-world use. I can see one use for the tech, though. It struck me during my experiment that the best reason to build an AI digital twin isnt to replace your voice or likeness, but to preserve it. I sometimes lose my voice, and its incredibly disruptive to my content production. If I was ever affected by a vocal disorder and lost it permanently, its nice to know that theres a highly realistic backup sitting on ElevenLabs servers. Its also cool to think that in 10 yearswhen Im inevitably older and wrinklier than todayI could bring my 2026 Digital Tom back to life. Hed be frozen in time, a perfect replica of my appearance, mannerisms, and environment in this specific moment, recallable for all eternity. I wont be using Digital Tom to augment my YouTube channel, get into podcasting, or read my kids a bedtime story anytime soon. But theres a strange part of me thats happy hes out there, just in case.
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Elon Musks AI chatbot Grok wont be able to edit photos to portray real people in revealing clothing in places where that is illegal, according to a statement posted on X. The announcement late Wednesday followed a global backlash over sexualized images of women and children, including bans and warnings by some governments. The pushback included an investigation announced Wednesday by the state of California, the U.S.’s most populous, into the proliferation of nonconsensual sexually explicit material produced using Grok that it said was harassing women and girls. Initially, media queries about the problem drew only the response, legacy media lies. Musks company, xAI, now says it will geoblock content if it violates laws in a particular place. We have implemented technological measures to prevent the Grok account from allowing the editing of images of real people in revealing clothing such as bikinis, underwear and other revealing attire, it said. The rule applies to all users, including paid subscribers, who have access to more features. xAI also has limited image creation or editing to paid subscribers only to ensure that individuals who attempt to abuse the Grok account to violate the law or our policies can be held accountable. Groks spicy mode had allowed users to create explicit content, leading to a backlash from governments worldwide. Malaysia and Indonesia took legal action and blocked access to Grok, while authorities in the Philippines said they were working to do the same, possibly within the week. The U.K. and European Union were investigating potential violations of online safety laws. France and India have also issued warnings, demanding stricter controls. Brazil called for an investigation into Groks misuse. The British government, which has been one of Grok’s most vociferous critics in recent days, has welcomed the change, while the country’s regulator, Ofcom, said it would carry on with its investigation. I shall not rest until all social media platforms meet their legal duties and provide a service that is safe and age-appropriate to all users, Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said. California Attorney General Rob Bonta urged xAI to ensure there is no further harassment of women and girls from Grok’s editing functions. We have zero tolerance for the AI-based creation and dissemination of nonconsensual intimate images or of child sexual abuse material, he said. California has passed laws to shield minors from AI-generated sexual imagery of children and require AI chatbot platforms to remind users they arent interacting with a human. But Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom also vetoed a law last year that would have restricted childrens access to AI chatbots. Elaine Kurtenbach, AP business writer Pan Pylas in London contributed to this report.
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