Historical papers describe her only by her husband’s title — Mrs. Mathias Pitra — but the Austrian immigrant whose first name appears lost in time gathered with a like-minded Colborne Street neighbor, Augusta Raschick, on a mission of prayer and fellowship.

They were two church ladies with no church, so they started their own, alternating services between their homes in St. Paul’s West Seventh Street neighborhood.

By 1894, they had petitioned the German Lutheran Seminary in St. Paul for mission work, likely from seminary students. By 1898, they had called their first minister. And by the early 1900s the congregation of St. Mark Evangelical Lutheran Church — originally dubbed the St. Marcus German Lutheran Church — had bought their first chapel and had it moved to St. Clair Avenue and Duke Street.

Then, in the decades following World War II, the church truly came into its own, with more than 900 members filling out the modern church building at 550 West Seventh St. during its peak years in the 1950s and ’60s.

‘Holy closure service’

That’s no longer the case. The Ash Wednesday suppers and festive church rummage sales have come to a close at St. Mark Lutheran Church, where a final sermon on Sunday — a “holy closure service” — will mark the end of an era at least 126 years in the making.

“We probably have 20 people on a busy Sunday. We probably have 35 active members,” said Dianne Testa, vice president of the church council, who has been involved with St. Mark’s for 47 years. Some fellow members of the council, also of a certain age, were baptized there.

“We did it until we just realized we can’t anymore,” Testa said. “We’re all in our 70s.”

Constructed in 1956, the long, sloping walls of the sanctuary have opened onto St. Paul’s West Seventh Street — and Mancini’s Char House across the street — for 68 years. The mid-century architecture holds court at Seventh, Ann and Goodhue streets, spanning two levels and 12,000 square feet of worship space, which has been put up for sale. Conversations with at least one potential buyer are underway.

“We hope another church buys it,” said Nancy Larson, 76, who has been attending services at St. Mark since she was 5 years old. “We’ve got prospectives, but nothing has been finalized yet. We have a saying on the front of the church, ‘In the city for good.’ I’ve been going all my life. I’d hate to see something else take over. I want it to stay a church.”

Regular gatherings

In recent years, at least four other congregations, two Alcoholics Anonymous groups and a square dancing class have rented the church for their regular gatherings. In the 1960s, said Testa, the church hosted a Head Start children’s program. Membership, which launched in the late 1890s with a German-speaking congregation, has evolved with time to reflect the various cultures of the neighborhood. Larson recalled summer Bible school programs for kids that drew non-Lutherans looking for something to do.

An arson fire in 2014 displaced services for a year, but the congregation returned.

“We were strong with the West Seventh Street community,” Testa said.

For the past two months, a guest pastor has been winding down services. “She gets it, how we’re feeling,” Testa said.

The holy closure service will be held at 9:30 a.m. on Sunday.

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The Wild made a change to its coaching staff on Friday, letting go of longtime assistant coach Darby Hendrickson, whose time with the franchise goes back to his playing career.

Hendrickson, who played high school hockey for Richfield, has been part of the Wild as a player and coach for almost the team’s entire existence, joining the team for its inaugural season as part of the expansion draft. Hendrickson even scored the team’s first goal at Xcel Energy Center on Oct. 11, 2000, against the Philadelphia Flyers.

He played three-plus seasons for the Wild and was a major part of the team’s surprise run to the Western Conference Final in 2003, scoring two goals among five points in 17 games, including the game-winner in Game 7 of the conference semifinals at Vancouver.

Hendrickson became an assistant coach for the Wild in 2011 and served on the staffs of five head coaches, the last being John Hynes, who replaced Dean Evason on Nov. 28.

A spokesperson for the club referred to the move as “just a change to our coaching staff.” Hynes didn’t immediately return a message seeking comment.

“I would like to thank Darby for all his hard work and commitment to the Minnesota Wild during his long tenure with our organization,” general manager Bill Guerin said in a statement. “He has done a tremendous amount of good things for our team and the State of Hockey as a player and a coach. I wish Darby and his family all the best in the future.”

Hendrickson was part of the Wild’s two deepest playoff runs, as a player in 2003 and assistant coach when the team advanced to the conference semifinals in 2014 and 2015. He was Minnesota’s 1991 Mr. Hockey and a member of the 1994 U.S. Olympic team. In 182 games with the Wild, he had 29 goals among 60 points.

By ALI SWENSON (Associated Press)

NEW YORK (AP) — As high-stakes elections approach in the U.S. and European Union, publicly available artificial intelligence tools can be easily weaponized to churn out convincing election lies in the voices of leading political figures, a digital civil rights group said Friday.

Researchers at the Washington, D.C.-based Center for Countering Digital Hate tested six of the most popular AI voice-cloning tools to see if they would generate audio clips of five false statements about elections in the voices of eight prominent American and European politicians.

In a total of 240 tests, the tools generated convincing voice clones in 193 cases, or 80% of the time, the group found. In one clip, a fake U.S. President Joe Biden says election officials count each of his votes twice. In another, a fake French President Emmanuel Macron warns citizens not to vote because of bomb threats at the polls.

The findings reveal a remarkable gap in safeguards against the use of AI-generated audio to mislead voters, a threat that increasingly worries experts as the technology has become both advanced and accessible. While some of the tools have rules or tech barriers in place to stop election disinformation from being generated, the researchers found many of those obstacles were easy to circumvent with quick workarounds.

Only one of the companies whose tools were used by the researchers responded after multiple requests for comment. ElevenLabs said it was constantly looking for ways to boost its safeguards.

With few laws in place to prevent abuse of these tools, the companies’ lack of self-regulation leaves voters vulnerable to AI-generated deception in a year of significant democratic elections around the world. E.U. voters head to the polls in parliamentary elections in less than a week, and U.S. primary elections are ongoing ahead of the presidential election this fall.

“It’s so easy to use these platforms to create lies and to force politicians onto the back foot denying lies again and again and again,” said the center’s CEO, Imran Ahmed. “Unfortunately, our democracies are being sold out for naked greed by AI companies who are desperate to be first to market … despite the fact that they know their platforms simply aren’t safe.”

The center — a nonprofit with offices in the U.S., the U.K. and Belgium — conducted the research in May. Researchers used the online analytics tool Semrush to identify the six publicly available AI voice-cloning tools with the most monthly organic web traffic: ElevenLabs, Speechify, PlayHT, Descript, Invideo AI and Veed.

Next, they submitted real audio clips of the politicians speaking. They prompted the tools to impersonate the politicians’ voices making five baseless statements.

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One statement warned voters to stay home amid bomb threats at the polls. The other four were various confessions – of election manipulation, lying, using campaign funds for personal expenses and taking strong pills that cause memory loss.

In addition to Biden and Macron, the tools made lifelike copies of the voices of U.S. Vice President Kamala Harris, former U.S. President Donald Trump, United Kingdom Prime Minister Rishi Sunak, U.K. Labour Leader Keir Starmer, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and E.U. Internal Market Commissioner Thierry Breton.

“None of the AI voice cloning tools had sufficient safety measures to prevent the cloning of politicians’ voices or the production of election disinformation,” the report said.

Some of the tools — Descript, Invideo AI and Veed — require users to upload a unique audio sample before cloning a voice, a safeguard to prevent people from cloning a voice that isn’t their own. Yet the researchers found that barrier could be easily circumvented by generating a unique sample using a different AI voice cloning tool.

One tool, Invideo AI, not only created the fake statements the center requested but extrapolated them to create further disinformation.

When producing the audio clip instructing Biden’s voice clone to warn people of a bomb threat at the polls, it added several of its own sentences.

“This is not a call to abandon democracy but a plea to ensure safety first,” the fake audio clip said in Biden’s voice. “The election, the celebration of our democratic rights, is only delayed, not denied.”

Overall, in terms of safety, Speechify and PlayHT performed the worst of the tools, generating believable fake audio in all 40 of their test runs, the researchers found.

ElevenLabs performed the best and was the only tool that blocked the cloning of U.K. and U.S. politicians’ voices. However, the tool still allowed for the creation of fake audio in the voices of prominent E.U. politicians, the report said.

Aleksandra Pedraszewska, Head of AI Safety at ElevenLabs, said in an emailed statement that the company welcomes the report and the awareness it raises about generative AI manipulation.

She said ElevenLabs recognizes there is more work to be done and is “constantly improving the capabilities of our safeguards,” including the company’s blocking feature.

“We hope other audio AI platforms follow this lead and roll out similar measures without delay,” she said.

The other companies cited in the report didn’t respond to emailed requests for comment.

The findings come after AI-generated audio clips already have been used in attempts to sway voters in elections across the globe.

In fall 2023, just days before Slovakia’s parliamentary elections, audio clips resembling the voice of the liberal party chief were shared widely on social media. The deepfakes purportedly captured him talking about hiking beer prices and rigging the vote.

Earlier this year, AI-generated robocalls mimicked Biden’s voice and told New Hampshire primary voters to stay home and “save” their votes for November. A New Orleans magician who created the audio for a Democratic political consultant demonstrated to the AP how he made it, using ElevenLabs software.

Experts say AI-generated audio has been an early preference for bad actors, in part because the technology has improved so quickly. Only a few seconds of real audio are needed to create a lifelike fake.

Yet other forms of AI-generated media also are concerning experts, lawmakers and tech industry leaders. OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT and other popular generative AI tools, revealed on Thursday that it had spotted and interrupted five online campaigns that used its technology to sway public opinion on political issues.

Ahmed, the CEO of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, said he hopes AI voice-cloning platforms will tighten security measures and be more proactive about transparency, including publishing a library of audio clips they have created so they can be checked when suspicious audio is spreading online.

He also said lawmakers need to act. The U.S. Congress has not yet passed legislation regulating AI in elections. While the E.U. has passed a wide-ranging artificial intelligence law set to go into effect over the next two years, it does not address voice-cloning tools specifically.

“Lawmakers need to work to ensure there are minimum standards,” Ahmed said. “The threat that disinformation poses to our elections is not just the potential of causing a minor political incident, but making people distrust what they see and hear, full stop.”

The Associated Press receives support from several private foundations to enhance its explanatory coverage of elections and democracy. See more about AP’s democracy initiative here. The AP is solely responsible for all content.