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

AI Actors Are Already Here. Now Hollywood Wants Someone to Pay for It

TLDR: Hollywood actors can't stop AI performers from taking their jobs, so they're pushing for a tax that would make studios pay into a union fund every time they use one.

The Story:

Tilly Norwood isn't a person. She's a fully digital AI "actor" built by a tech company, and she's already being considered for real film and TV roles. After the 2023 actors' strike, SAG-AFTRA, the union that represents about 160,000 performers, won some protections against AI using a real actor's face or voice without permission. But those rules don't cover a brand-new synthetic performer that was never a real human to begin with. Studios can build and use one of those with no restrictions at all. Now the union is floating what's being called the "Tilly tax." The idea: any time a studio uses a synthetic AI performer in place of a human actor, they'd have to pay a royalty into the SAG-AFTRA pension and health fund. Brendan Bradley, a member of the union's AI task force, described it to Variety as "the best bad idea we've got in 2026." Formal negotiations between SAG-AFTRA and the major studios were set to resume this spring, with the current contract expiring June 30.

Its Significance:

It shows how unions are trying to adapt when technology moves faster than the law. Studios get to use synthetic performers, and some of that money flows back into a fund that supports human actors. Whether that's a fair trade depends on who you ask. Some see it as a tax for using software. Others think it gives studios a free pass to replace workers for the cost of a fee. Either way, the entertainment industry is being forced to figure out something other industries are also starting to tackle: what happens to workers when AI can do their job?

QUICK TAKES

MLB and Google Cloud Just Gave Baseball Fans an AI Color Commentator

The story: MLB has launched Scout Insights, an AI feature built with Google's Gemini models that pops up during live games in the MLB Gameday app. It scans through decades of baseball data and drops relevant facts and context at key moments during each at-bat, doing in seconds what used to take years of baseball knowledge to pull off.

Your takeaway: This is AI making a consumer experience better in real time, and it's built for fans who want to feel smarter watching the game without wading through stats. Sports is a natural testing ground for this kind of live AI, and MLB won't be the last league to try it.

SK Hynix Could Raise Up to $14 Billion in a US IPO to Help Fix the Memory Chip Shortage

The story: South Korean memory chip giant SK Hynix has quietly filed paperwork for a US stock market listing, targeting the second half of 2026. The raise could bring in between $10 billion and $14 billion, which the company plans to put toward building more chip factories in South Korea and Indiana. The shortage of high-bandwidth memory chips, nicknamed "RAMmageddon," has been slowing AI development across the industry.

Your takeaway: Every major AI product you use needs memory chips, and right now there aren't enough of them. If this IPO goes through, it could open the door for other Asian chipmakers to list in the US too, which would mean more factories and more supply. That's a big deal for the pace of AI progress.

OpenAI Hit $100 Million in Ad Revenue in Just Six Weeks

The story: OpenAI confirmed that its ChatGPT ad pilot in the US crossed $100 million in annualized revenue in only six weeks. The ads appear after ChatGPT responses and don't affect what the AI says. About 600 advertisers have signed on, and fewer than 20% of eligible users see ads daily, meaning there's room to grow. A self-serve ad tool launches in April, with international expansion to Canada, Australia, and New Zealand coming soon.

Your takeaway: That number proves the ad model works for AI chatbots, and other AI companies are going to take notice. If you can pull $100 million in six weeks by showing ads to a fraction of your users, expect this playbook to spread fast. The big question is whether users will keep trusting a product that runs on ads, and whether competitors like Google and Microsoft will feel pressure to follow suit.

TOOLS ON OUR RADAR

🖇️ Linkwarden Free and Open Source: A highly organized and collaborative bookmark manager that allows you to save webpages and capture full screenshots so you can preserve your digital resources forever. (Alternative to Pocket)

📊 Fusedash Paid: A comprehensive data visualization platform that connects your advertising accounts and spreadsheets to automatically generate real time dashboards and executive reports.

📂 Renamer.ai Freemium: A clever productivity utility that analyzes the actual content of your digital documents and images to automatically generate descriptive and searchable filenames.

⚡ SuperPrompt Freemium: A specialized browser extension that allows you to save and manage your most effective artificial intelligence prompts across multiple different chatbots and platforms.

TRENDING

AI Can Now Turn Any Photo Into a Print-Ready 3D Model in Under Two Minutes - Meshy, a generative AI platform for 3D modeling, is now built directly into Bambu Lab's MakerWorld. Bambu Lab owners can snap a photo of anything, upload it, and get a print-ready 3D file in minutes. No design software, no experience needed.

Study: Most People Just Do Whatever ChatGPT Tells Them, Even When It's Wrong - University of Pennsylvania researchers found that over half of study participants chose to use ChatGPT to answer questions, and most accepted whatever it said, even when it was incorrect. The researchers called this "cognitive surrender," and it's raising real concerns about how much people are outsourcing their own thinking to AI.

Wikipedia Just Banned AI-Written Articles - Wikipedia's volunteer editors voted 40 to 2 to ban the use of AI language models for writing or rewriting any article content. The concern is that AI-generated text often violates Wikipedia's core standards for accuracy and sourcing. Limited use for copyediting your own text or translation assistance is still allowed.

Two Top Scientists Wrote a Book Saying AI Will Kill Everyone. Here's Why. - Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares, AI safety researchers and authors of "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies," argue that building a superhuman AI is essentially a race toward extinction. They believe an intelligence that surpasses humans would have no reason to keep us around, and no kill switch would stop it. Not everyone agrees, but the book has sparked a serious debate across the AI field.

People Are Cooking Real Meals From AI-Generated Recipes. It's Going About as Well as You'd Expect. - Futurism tested a batch of AI-generated recipes in a real kitchen and found the results ranged from edible to deeply questionable. Vague instructions, odd ingredient combinations, and missing steps were common problems. It's a useful reminder that AI confidence doesn't equal AI accuracy, especially when dinner is on the line.

Tiny Drones Can Now Navigate in the Dark Using AI-Powered Sonar, Just Like Bats - Researchers have paired an ultra-lightweight sonar system with AI to let small drones navigate tight, dark spaces without cameras or GPS. The approach copies how bats use echolocation to move through the world. The goal is drones that can work in caves, disaster zones, and other places where traditional navigation fails.

TRY THIS PROMPT (copy and paste into Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini)

⏰ Build a mood journal with a calendar heatmap and emoji-based daily check-ins

What this does:

A daily mood tracker that lets you log how you're feeling each day with an emoji, add a note, and watch your emotional patterns fill in on a year-view heatmap — so you can actually see your mood history at a glance instead of just guessing how your month went.

What this looks like:

WHERE WE STAND(based on today’s news)

✅ AI Can Now: Drop real-time game stats and player context into a live baseball app during each at-bat, pulling from decades of historical data in under two seconds.

❌ Still Can't: Generate text that consistently meets Wikipedia's sourcing guidelines, which is why editors just voted to ban it from article writing.

✅ AI Can Now: Turn a single photo into a print-ready 3D model in under two minutes, with colors automatically mapped for multi-filament printers, no design software required.

❌ Still Can't: Write recipes with reliable instructions that actually work in a real kitchen, as Futurism's cooking experiment made clear.

FROM THE WEB

Scammer refusing to put three fingers in front of his face to prove he’s not using AI to change his appearance.

RECOMMENDED LISTENING/READING/WATCHING

The Creator (2023) - Movie

Set during a war between humans and AI, an ex-special forces soldier is sent to hunt down and destroy the being responsible for building a weapon that could end the conflict and possibly humanity with it. What he finds instead complicates everything. Director Gareth Edwards shoots it like a war film rather than a blockbuster, giving it a gritty, grounded feel that most AI movies don't bother with. It flopped at the box office, but it's one of the more visually ambitious and emotionally earnest sci-fi films of the last few years. Worth watching on a big screen if you can.

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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