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Beginners in AI
Good morning and thank you for joining us again!
Welcome to this daily edition of Beginners in AI, where we explore the latest trends, tools, and news in the world of AI and the tech that surrounds it. Like all editions, this is human curated and edited, and published with the intention of making AI news and technology more accessible to everyone.
THE FRONT PAGE
A First: AI Built for Public Defenders, Not Big Law Firms
TLDR: New Jersey built the first AI research tool made just for public defenders, and it turns hours of legal research into seconds.
The Story:
New Jersey's Office of the Public Defender teamed up with Princeton University to build an AI search tool called the OPD Resource Library. It's the first of its kind for a public defender office in the country. A lawyer types in a plain-language legal question, and the tool digs through past briefs, motions, and internal files to pull up the parts that matter. It also writes a short summary and shows the original document with the key section highlighted, so the lawyer can check it fast. Princeton's researchers built it from scratch instead of grabbing an off-the-shelf product, training it to understand how public defense actually works. The state's public defender, Jennifer Sellitti, said gathering the core legal arguments used to take hours and now takes seconds.
Its Significance:
Public defenders represent people who can't afford a lawyer, and they're often buried under giant caseloads. When one lawyer has too many cases, the people they defend get less time and attention. A tool that speeds up the slow research part means lawyers can spend more time building a real defense. The team also worked hard to cut down on AI mistakes, since a made-up case or a wrong citation could cost someone their freedom. Lawyers still check every result and make the final call. If it holds up, other states could copy the same idea. Expect this to become standardized in other states as the tools catch on.
QUICK TAKES
The story: At the SIGGRAPH conference, NVIDIA showed a tool called Synthetic Video Detector that checks video frame by frame and scores how likely it is to be AI-made. It hit up to 92% accuracy on clean video and can rate a clip in about 22 milliseconds.
Your takeaway: As fake videos get harder to spot, newsrooms and broadcasters need a fast way to flag them. This gives editors a score to help decide what to trust before it goes public. It's a helper, not a final verdict, and it gets less accurate once a video is heavily compressed.
The story: A federal judge approved Anthropic's $1.5 billion settlement with a group of authors who said the company used pirated copies of their books to train its Claude AI. It's the largest known copyright payout in US history, and authors are set to get about $3,000 per book.
Your takeaway: This is the first big US AI copyright case to settle, and it puts a real price tag on training AI with work you don't own. Cases against other AI companies are still moving through the courts.
The story: People with no coding skills are using AI to build phone apps, and they're flooding Apple's App Store. Developers submitted about 560,000 new apps in just the first six months of this year, already close to the total for all of last year, per Sensor Tower.
Your takeaway: "Vibecoding" makes building an app easy, but easy doesn't mean good. A lot of them are low-effort copies of apps that already exist, and reviewers now have far more to sort through. It's a double-edged sword.
TOOLS ON OUR RADAR
🚀 Dashy Free and Open Source: A highly customizable homepage that allows you to organize all of your favorite websites and personal applications into one beautiful and easy to navigate digital dashboard.
🎵 Navidrome Free and Open Source: A fast and lightweight music server that lets you listen to your own personal audio collection from any device using any compatible music player.
🔔 Ntfy Free and Open Source: A simple service that allows you to send push notifications directly to your phone or desktop from any application without needing a complex setup process.
🔍 SearXNG Free and Open Source: A privacy respecting search engine that aggregates results from many different sources while keeping your search history and personal data completely anonymous.
TRENDING
The New York Times acknowledges "Google Zero" - The Times is now openly recognizing the drop in web traffic as Google's AI answers keep people from clicking through to news sites. It's still growing on paying subscribers, but the shift is a warning for publishers that lean on search.
White House weighs limits on Chinese open-source AI - The White House is considering new curbs on powerful Chinese open-source models after Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 matched top US models at a much lower cost, according to Axios. Options include export-style restrictions and federal purchasing rules, though no formal ban has been announced.
Sony Music sues Udio again over 30,000+ songs - Sony filed a second lawsuit against AI music maker Udio, listing 30,117 recordings it says were copied without permission to train Udio's models. Sony went this route after a judge blocked it from adding those songs to its original 2024 case.
This AI "pocket pet" grows by talking with you - A startup's AI pet named Sweekar uses your voice to grow, learning to recognize you and remembering your chats as it develops from a baby to an adult. It's a modern take on the Tamagotchi, with talking as the main way you bond with it.
Microsoft pours billions into Mistral's Europe push - Microsoft is funding French AI company Mistral to expand its data centers across Europe and bring Mistral's models into Microsoft's tools. The deal targets European businesses that want the most advanced AI while keeping tight control over their own data.
90% of students now use AI in the classroom - A poll from Instructure, the company behind Canvas, found about 90% of students use AI for schoolwork. Schools are still figuring out how to guide that use without opening the door to cheating.
AI is speeding up how doctors read scans - AI is helping radiologists read medical images faster by flagging possible problems and moving urgent cases to the front of the line. Doctors still make the final diagnosis, but the extra speed can mean patients wait less for answers.
The first way to trade directly inside Claude and ChatGPT
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Co-Invest puts it right in your chat window. Analyze markets, manage risk, and execute trades, all inside Claude and ChatGPT.
The institutions built the game, Co-Invest gives you a way to beat them.
TRY THIS PROMPT (copy and paste into Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini)
📚 Umberto Eco's idea of an anti-library, amplified by Nassim Taleb: the value of your library is what you haven't yet met
Build me a single-file HTML app I can open in my browser without any setup. Pure vanilla HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, no frameworks, no CDN. Create The Anti-Library, a tool inspired by Umberto Eco's idea that unread books are more valuable than read ones. Aged paper aesthetic: cream paper (#f2ead5) background with a subtle paper grain texture, Baskerville/Hoefler serif typography throughout, burgundy red (#8b2a1e) and old gold (#b88a2a) accents, small-caps headings. Include: a header with an ornate double-rule border featuring the Eco/Taleb epigraph, a catalog form to add books (title, author, category, 'why did this find you?' note), 10 category options each with their own spine color (philosophy deep purple, fiction burgundy, science navy, history gold, poetry olive, biography forest, economics charcoal, psychology plum, art magenta, other brown), a shelf display rendering each book as a vertical SVG/CSS spine with varied heights (150-200px) and widths, gold bands and embossed decorative lines on random spines, vertical writing-mode title text on each spine in small-caps, hover tilt animation, click to open a book detail modal, read books appear faded/lighter than unread ones, filter bar for All/Unread/Read shelves, four header stats (Unread/Read/Total/Ignorance Ratio), a 'Pick a Random Unread' button that surfaces a book with contemplative framing ("The library suggests..."), a 'Map of Ignorance' grid of dots where red dots = unread, green = read, grey = empty slots, a category legend with color swatches and counts, a 'Load Sample Library' button with 12 intimidating classics pre-written, and 'Empty the Shelves' as a destructive action. The tone throughout should be reverent, bookish, slightly self-aware, almost like a monastery's private catalog. Make it work in a single HTML file.What this does: Cataloging your intentional ignorance the way old estates once cataloged their holdings. Add any book with title, author, category, and a note on why it found you. Each appears on the shelves as a hand-rendered spine, colored by category, faded once read. Hit "Pick a Random Unread" and the library chooses your next read. A Map of Ignorance visualizes your unread-to-read ratio so the growing pile feels like a feature, not a debt. Built on Umberto Eco's idea, amplified by Nassim Taleb: the value of your library is what you haven't yet met.
What this looks like:
WHERE WE STAND(based on today’s news)
✅ AI Can Now: Pull the right past legal brief for a public defender in seconds instead of hours.
❌ Still Can't: Be trusted without a human checking it, since it can still invent fake cases or wrong citations.
✅ AI Can Now: Score a video for signs it's AI-made in about 22 milliseconds.
❌ Still Can't: Catch every fake, especially once a clip gets heavily compressed by social platforms.
FROM THE WEB
RECOMMENDED LISTENING/READING/WATCHING
Beacon 23 by Hugh Howey - Book
The interconnected 2015 novella series by the author of Wool (later adapted into the MGM+ show with Lena Headey), following a traumatized veteran who takes a job manning a lonely deep-space navigation beacon far from Earth, working alone with a chatty AI companion whose voice is his only company for years at a stretch. Howey wrote it partly as an homage to old-world lighthouse keepers.
Thank you for reading. We’re all beginners in something. With that in mind, your questions and feedback are always welcome and I read every single email!
-James
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