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How Jennifer Aniston’s LolaVie brand grew sales 40% with CTV ads
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Beginners in AI
Good morning and thank you for joining us again!
An Australian startup has kept scammers talking for 17 years' worth of conversations, and every single time they were talking to a bot. Today I'll show you how AI agents posing as easy targets are collecting the evidence that shuts scams down, plus the fastest AI voice yet and a new way to spot AI-made songs. As always, every story here is human picked and edited.
THE FRONT PAGE
AI Bots Wasted 17 Years of Scammers' Time Across 2.5 Million Chats
TLDR: An Australian startup called Apate sends AI agents to pose as scam victims, keeping scammers busy while it collects their bank accounts, crypto wallets and phone numbers.
The Story:
Apate's agents answer scam calls, reply to sketchy texts and emails, click phishing links and even join fake investment groups. Each one sounds like a different person, with its own age, accent and language. The company says they've held about 2.5 million conversations and wasted roughly 17 years of scammers' time.
Banks and phone companies pay for what the bots learn. Australia's TPG Telecom has sent nearly 590,000 scam calls their way, and Commonwealth Bank, another customer, has seen publicly reported scam losses fall 76%. Founder Dali Kaafar got the idea after keeping a scammer on the phone for 44 minutes at a family picnic. Apate has raised about $10 million and is opening a London office.
Its Significance:
Scams run on volume, so every minute a crook spends chatting with a bot is a minute he isn't spending on your parents. The FBI logged over 22,000 complaints about AI-related crime in 2025, with about $893 million lost. Here AI works for the victims: the details the bots pull out can get accounts frozen and fake sites taken down. You can't hire Apate yourself, but you can borrow the move. If a call feels off, stall, ask questions, and never pay or read out a code.
QUICK TAKES
The story: xAI's new voice model answers in under a second and tops Artificial Analysis's speech-to-speech ranking at 86.9, ahead of OpenAI's and Google's voice models. xAI says Starlink's support line uses it for about 20,000 calls a day and solves roughly 70% without a person.
Your takeaway: Customer service bots are about to sound a lot less like "press 1 for billing." It's not best at everything, though: on one tough support-call test it scored 71.6% to OpenAI's 74.5%.
The story: Starting this week, a label appears on the player page when AI created a track's music and vocals, and tapping it shows more detail. YouTube says it uses its own detection tools plus information from music partners, and the labels are coming to the main YouTube app too.
Your takeaway: You'll finally know if that new artist in your playlist is a person. YouTube hasn't shared how accurate its detection is, so a song without a label isn't proof a human made it.
The story: In a sample of 250,000 U.S. chats, Anthropic says about 0.5% were about elections and 0.01% asked Claude who to vote for. Later this month Claude will give state-specific answers on where to vote and what ID to bring, using the nonpartisan group Democracy Works, and show official results on election night.
Your takeaway: Outside testers found Claude turned down single harmful requests but could miss a fake-news campaign split into small, harmless-looking tasks. Use any chatbot as a starting point, then check your state's election website before you head out.
TOOLS ON OUR RADAR
💬 Element Free and Open Source: An encrypted Slack and WhatsApp alternative for group chats and calls, free on phones and computers.
🗺️ OsmAnd Free and Open Source: A Google Maps alternative that works offline on Android and iPhone, with 7 free map downloads.
📊 Grist Freemium: A spreadsheet that works like a simple database, free for up to 5,000 rows per document.
📺 NewPipe Free and Open Source: Watch YouTube on Android without ads or an account, with background play and downloads.
🎙️ Wispr Flow Freemium: Type with your voice in any app, free for 2,000 words a week on desktop.
🗣️ ElevenLabs Freemium: Turns text into lifelike AI voices with 10,000 free credits a month, a hands-on look at today's voice story.
TRENDING
Google and Singapore Put a Scam Detector on Your Phone. Google DeepMind trained a small Gemma model on local scam chats to warn you before you send money or details. It runs on the phone itself, so Google says neither it nor the government can read your messages.
Deezer Will Let You Hide AI-Made Music. More than half the tracks uploaded to Deezer each day, about 90,000, are now AI-generated. A switch to hide them from search arrives before the end of the year.
OpenAI Says EU Small Businesses Use Its Agents 8 Times More Than in May. Weekly users of Codex and ChatGPT Work at companies with 200 or fewer users grew more than eightfold, in every EU country. OpenAI didn't share the actual user counts.
Flock's CEO Says Its Microphones Hear "Just Gunshots." Its Website Disagrees. The site says they also catch fireworks, street takeovers and car crashes. Texas and Florida have moved to drop the police surveillance company, and Ring ended its partnership.
Zenzap Raises $44 Million to Get WhatsApp Out of the Workplace. The chat app counts FedEx, Taco Bell and Starbucks as clients, and it's free for basic use with paid plans from $51 a month for 20 people.
Anthropic Opens a Singapore Office and Signs a Safety Deal With the Government. Anthropic says Singapore uses Claude about six times more than its size would predict, second of 121 countries. More than 1,500 engineers at GovTech Singapore use Claude Code.
TRY THIS PROMPT (copy and paste into Claude, Grok, ChatGPT, or Gemini)
🎣 Stall the Scammer: paste a sketchy message and get the red flags plus a script to buy time
Build a single-file HTML app called Stall the Scammer in vanilla HTML, CSS and JavaScript. It runs entirely in the browser: no API calls, no API key, nothing sent anywhere.
I paste a suspicious text, email or what a caller said, then pick how it reached me (call, text, email, social media) and who they claim to be (bank, government, tech support, delivery, family, employer, investment).
Using built-in keyword rules, the app spots common scam red flags: pressure to act fast, requests for a code, gift cards, crypto, wire transfers, secrecy, links, threats of arrest, surprise prizes, remote access, personal details, a loved one in trouble and guaranteed returns. It shows a risk meter, one card per red flag explaining why it matters, and a stall-and-check plan with exact words to say and how to verify through official channels. It never says a message is safe.
Style: near-black background, amber and teal accents, Space Grotesk and Newsreader fonts.What this does: Paste a suspicious text, email or what a caller told you, and say who they claim to be. The app points out each scam warning sign it finds, explains why it matters, and gives you the exact words to stall while you check with the real bank, agency or family member. It runs entirely in your browser, so nothing you paste goes anywhere.
See what's really happening in every deal
Aligned shows you what buyers are doing between meetings inside your most important deals then surfaces the risks, openings, and next steps. No more guessing where a deal stands or finding out a champion went quiet too late. Just real visibility, so you can act before it's too late.
WHERE WE STAND(based on today’s news)
✅ AI Can Now: hold millions of convincing chats with scammers in different voices, ages and languages, and pull out the bank accounts they use.
❌ Still Can't: shut a scam down on its own. A bank or a person still has to freeze the account or take the site down.
✅ AI Can Now: talk back in under a second and handle you interrupting mid-sentence, per xAI's tests.
❌ Still Can't: get hard support calls right every time. Grok Voice 3.0 solved 71.6% of them in one test.
FROM THE WEB
RECOMMENDED LISTENING/READING/WATCHING
Today’s lead story reminded me of this video. Comedian James Veitch spent weeks answering a spammer's emails just to waste his time, and this 10-minute TED talk is the result. It's the hand-made version of what Apate's bots now do millions of times over. Watch it for the laughs, then notice how many of the scammer's tricks show up in today's Try This Prompt.
How was today's edition? Tap one below, then tell me what you'd change on the next screen. I read every answer.
How was today's edition?
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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