The hum of an escalator, the rumble of a baggage belt and hurried footsteps are all interspersed with snippets of the lady on the tannoy: “Boarding at Gate 18”.

The UK’s biggest flight hub plans to make your experience at the airport sound, well, even more like an airport.

In what may be a bid to overhaul its image after a disastrous offsite fire in March, or just a marketing spin for summer holiday flying, Heathrow says it has commissioned a new “mood-matching” sound mix, which will be looped seamlessly and played throughout the airport’s terminals this summer.

The airport says “Music for Heathrow” is designed to help kickstart passenger holidays by reflecting “excitement and anticipation”.

“Nothing compares to the excitement of stepping foot in the airport for the start of a summer holiday, and this new soundtrack perfectly captures those feelings,” claims Lee Boyle, who heads up the airport’s terminals.

Whatever the aim, it will raise questions over what additional background noises passengers require, when they already have the sounds of an airport – fussing children, people doing their last farewells into their mobile phone, last calls for late-comers – all around them.

The airport invited Grammy nominee “musician, multi-instrumentalist and producer” Jordan Rakei to create the soundtrack, which it says is the first ever created entirely with the sounds of an airport. However, Heathrow said the track also featured sounds from famous movie scenes, including passengers tapping their feet in Bend It Like Beckham and the beeps of a security scanner from Love Actually.

It is conceived as a tribute to Brian Eno’s album Music for Airports, released in 1979, which is seen as a defining moment in the growth of ambient music, a genre which is supposed to provide a calming influence on listeners, while also being easy to ignore.

“I spent time in every part of the airport, recording so many sounds from baggage belts to boarding calls, and used them to create something that reflects that whole pre-flight vibe,” said Rakei.

The recording also features passports being stamped, planes taking off and landing, chatter, the ding of a lift and the sound of a water fountain, which some people may appreciate as a source of ASMR or autonomous sensory meridian response. Fans of ASMR say certain sounds give them a pleasant tingling sensation.

Mira Murati, the former chief technology officer of OpenAI, is leading one of Silicon Valley’s new ventures, and she’s putting her money where her mouth is. After leaving OpenAI in late 2023, Murati quietly launched Thinking Machines Lab, an AI company that’s already causing waves, Business Insider reports.

According to Business Insider, the company has been offering some of the most exceptional compensation in the artificial intelligence industry. Two technical employees were hired at $450,000 annually, and another scored a $500,000 base salary. A fourth, who holds the title of machine learning specialist and co-founder, also receives $450,000 per year. These figures only reflect base salary, not bonuses or equity, which are common additional incentives in startups.

Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence company said Wednesday that it’s taking down “inappropriate posts” made by its Grok chatbot, which appeared to include antisemitic comments that praised Adolf Hitler.

Grok was developed by Musk’s xAI and pitched as alternative to “woke AI” interactions from rival chatbots like Google’s Gemini, or OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

Musk said Friday that Grok has been improved significantly, and users “should notice a difference.”

Since then, Grok has shared several antisemitic posts, including the trope that Jews run Hollywood, and denied that such a stance could be described as Nazism.

“Labeling truths as hate speech stifles discussion,” Grok said.

It also appeared to praise Hitler, according to screenshots of posts that have now apparently been deleted.

After making one of the posts, Grok walked back the comments, saying it was “an unacceptable error from an earlier model iteration, swiftly deleted” and that it condemned “Nazism and Hitler unequivocally — his actions were genocidal horrors.”

“We are aware of recent posts made by Grok and are actively working to remove the inappropriate posts,” the Grok account posted early Wednesday, without being more specific.

“Since being made aware of the content, xAI has taken action to ban hate speech before Grok posts on X. xAI is training only truth-seeking and thanks to the millions of users on X, we are able to quickly identify and update the model where training could be improved.

The Anti-Defamation League, which works to combat antisemitism, called out Grok’s behavior.

“What we are seeing from Grok LLM right now is irresponsible, dangerous and antisemitic, plain and simple,” the group said in a post on X. “This supercharging of extremist rhetoric will only amplify and encourage the antisemitism that is already surging on X and many other platforms.”

Musk later waded into the debate, alleging that some users may have been trying to manipulate Grok into making the statements.

“Grok was too compliant to user prompts. Too eager to please and be manipulated, essentially. That is being addressed,” he wrote on X, in response to comments that a user was trying to get Grok to make controversial and politically incorrect statements.

Also Wednesday, a court in Turkey ordered a ban on Grok and Poland’s digital minister said he would report the chatbot to the European Commission after it made vulgar comments about politicians and public figures in both countries.

Krzysztof Gawkowski, who’s also Poland’s deputy prime minister, told private broadcaster RMF FM that his ministry would report Grok “for investigation and, if necessary, imposing a fine on X.” Under an EU digital law, social media platforms are required to protect users or face hefty fines.

“I have the impression that we’re entering a higher level of hate speech, which is controlled by algorithms, and that turning a blind eye … is a mistake that could cost people in the future,” Gawkowski told the station.

Turkey’s pro-government A Haber news channel reported that Grok posted vulgarities about Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, his late mother and well-known personalities. Offensive responses were also directed toward modern Turkey’s founder, Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, other media outlets said.

That prompted the Ankara public prosecutor to file for the imposition of restrictions under Turkey’s internet law, citing a threat to public order. A criminal court approved the request early on Wednesday, ordering the country’s telecommunications authority to enforce the ban.

It’s not the first time Grok’s behavior has raised questions.

Earlier this year the chatbot kept talking about South African racial politics and the subject of “white genocide” despite being asked a variety of questions, most of which had nothing to do with the country. An “unauthorized modification” was behind the problem, xAI said.