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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
AI Devours Publishing as Authors Guild Opens Free Certification to 200,000+ Writers
TLDR: AI-written books are quietly filling bookstores and bestseller lists, and even major publishers are getting fooled.
The Story:
A growing body of evidence shows that AI-generated books are spreading through major publishing channels faster than the industry can catch them. In March 2026, Hachette Book Group canceled its upcoming U.S. publication of horror novel Shy Girl by Mia Ballard after readers on Goodreads and Reddit flagged telltale signs: repetitive phrasing, an overuse of "the rule of three," and what many called an inconsistent voice. The book had already racked up over 4,900 ratings on Goodreads and built a following on BookTok before Hachette pulled it. It's the first time a major publisher has walked back a book deal over suspected AI use. Around the same time, the New York Times discovered one of its book reviews contained language strikingly similar to a Guardian review of the same novel. The reviewer admitted he'd used an AI editing tool and failed to catch the overlap.
Its Significance:
These aren't isolated cases. The Authors Guild launched a "Human Authored" certification program, first for members in January 2025, then for all authors in early 2026. That tells you how widespread the problem has gotten. For readers, the risk is simple: you might pay $15 for a book that no human actually wrote, and you'd probably never know. For writers, it's worse. Their styles, voices, and sentence patterns are being absorbed by AI models trained on their copyrighted work. Anthropic agreed to pay up to $1.5 billion to thousands of authors in 2025 after a court ruled it had used their books without permission. The publishing world is just starting to figure out how to handle this, and right now, the tools to detect AI writing can't keep up with the tools creating it.
QUICK TAKES
The story: A new research paper introduces the first framework for understanding how bad actors can trick AI agents that browse the web on their own. The researchers identified six categories of attack, from hidden content that agents read but humans can't see, to traps that corrupt an agent's memory or force it to take actions its user never approved.
Your takeaway: As more AI agents shop, trade, and browse on our behalf (see: that 393% traffic jump above), they become targets. These aren't theoretical risks. If an agent can be tricked into buying the wrong product or leaking your data through a poisoned webpage, the person holding the bill is you. Right now, defenses haven't caught up.
The story: Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong announced the company is testing AI agents that show up in Slack and email like regular coworkers. The first two are modeled after co-founder Fred Ehrsam (focused on strategy) and former CTO Balaji Srinivasan (focused on big-picture thinking). Armstrong says he expects Coinbase to have more AI agents than human employees "at some point soon."
Your takeaway: This is one of the clearest examples yet of a company treating AI agents as actual staff members, not just tools. Coinbase has about 4,000 employees. If even a fraction of routine feedback and planning shifts to AI agents, it changes what "headcount" means at a tech company. Other firms will be watching closely.
The story: New data from Adobe Analytics shows AI-driven traffic to U.S. retail websites grew 393% year-over-year in Q1 2026. The bigger surprise: shoppers who arrive through AI tools spend 48% more time on the page, browse 13% more pages, and convert at a 42% higher rate than regular visitors. A year ago, AI traffic converted 38% worse than human traffic.
Your takeaway: That's a complete reversal in 12 months. AI isn't just sending more people to stores; it's sending better shoppers. McKinsey projects AI-led shopping could drive $1 trillion in U.S. retail revenue by 2030. A federal judge already had to block one AI browser from auto-buying on Amazon. The fight over who controls AI shopping is just getting started.
TOOLS ON OUR RADAR
📝 Memos Free and Open Source: A privacy focused note taking application that allows you to capture your thoughts and ideas in a simple and organized stream for your eyes only.
✈️ Plane Freemium: A modern project management tool that helps teams track issues and product roadmaps with a clean interface that works as a great alternative to complex proprietary software.
🧩 Activepieces Freemium: A user friendly automation platform that allows you to connect your favorite apps and create clever workflows without needing to write any code.
💼 Twenty Freemium and Open Source: A sophisticated relationship management system that helps businesses track their customers and sales leads with a beautiful and modern design.
TRENDING
AI Agents Now Run 19% of DeFi Activity, But Humans Still Beat Them 5-to-1 at Trading - AI bots handle nearly a fifth of all on-chain crypto activity, according to a new DWF Ventures report. But in head-to-head trading contests, the best human trader still beat the best AI agent by more than 5x. Agents do well at narrow, repetitive tasks like moving money between lending protocols, but they fall apart when market conditions get messy and unpredictable.
AI-Powered Security Tool Caught the Axios Supply Chain Attack in Real Time - When North Korean hackers hijacked the Axios JavaScript library (used by 100 million developers weekly) in late March 2026, an engineer at Elastic Security Labs caught it using an AI-powered monitoring tool he'd built on his laptop three days earlier. The poisoned code was live for about three hours. OpenAI, which used the library in its Mac app signing process, had to revoke and rotate its security certificates.
AI-Generated Val Kilmer Appears in Over an Hour of New Film - The trailer for As Deep as the Grave shows an AI-generated Val Kilmer playing a Catholic priest and Native American spiritualist. Kilmer died in April 2025 and was too sick to film his scenes. His family approved the recreation, and the filmmakers say he appears on screen for over an hour. It's one of the most extensive uses of AI to recreate a deceased actor in a feature film so far.
Restb.ai Passes 1 Million Real Estate Agents With AI Deployment Across 26 MLSs - Restb.ai, which uses computer vision to analyze property photos and auto-fill listing data, now serves more than 1 million agents and brokers across North America. The company's AI scans property images to tag features, check compliance, and generate listing descriptions, reducing manual data entry for agents.
New AI System Maps Ocean Currents Using Existing Weather Satellites - Scientists built GOFLOW, a deep learning system that tracks ocean currents by watching how temperature patterns shift in hourly satellite images. It works with weather satellites already in orbit, so no new hardware is needed. The research, published in Nature Geoscience, could improve search-and-rescue operations and oil spill tracking.
TRY THIS PROMPT (copy and paste into Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini)
🌼 A zen meadow simulator with bees and flowers
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 a Flower Field Pollinator, a zen meadow simulator, with a soft cream (#f4efe3) background and honey gold (#e8a73a) accents, using Georgia serif typography for a storybook feel. Include: an HTML5 canvas meadow with a sky gradient that shifts with time of day (dawn, morning, midday, afternoon, golden hour, dusk), a hand-drawn SVG beehive in the corner, 6 distinct flower species (daisy, poppy, lavender, sunflower, clover, bluebell) each rendered with their own petal shapes and colors, a seed packet palette to choose which flower to plant, click-to-plant flower placement with a little grow-in animation and curving stem, pixel bees that emerge from the hive, fly to flowers, hover to pollinate, collect nectar, and return to the hive carrying pollen (with animated wings and stripes), sliders for Bee Count, Bee Speed, and Time of Day, a stats panel tracking Flowers, Species, Pollinations, Bees Flying, and a honey jar showing drops of honey accumulated, a Scatter Wildflowers button that seeds 12 random flowers, a meadow journal that logs poetic entries as milestones are hit ("The first flower takes root", "A hundred blooms. The meadow has arrived"). Cross-pollination (a bee carrying pollen from one species visits another) should pollinate the flower and add to honey. Flowers regenerate nectar slowly over time. Make it work in a single HTML file.What this does:
Click anywhere to plant flowers from six species, and bees quietly emerge from the hive to find them. They fly to each bloom, hover with beating wings, collect nectar, and carry pollen back, cross-pollinating as they go. Honey accumulates drop by drop. A meadow journal records poetic milestones as your field fills in. Adjust the time of day to watch the sky shift from dawn through dusk over your little pollinator world.
What this looks like:
WHERE WE STAND(based on today’s news)
✅ AI Can Now: Write a novel convincing enough to get a deal with one of the world's biggest publishers and fool thousands of readers on Goodreads
❌ Still Can't: Avoid the telltale patterns (repetitive phrasing, "rule of three" overuse) that eventually give it away to careful human readers
✅ AI Can Now: Send better-converting shoppers to retail websites than traditional search and email channels
❌ Still Can't: Beat a skilled human trader at open-ended, unpredictable financial decisions, losing by a 5-to-1 margin in head-to-head contests
FROM THE WEB
RECOMMENDED LISTENING/READING/WATCHING
Gale Force Nine released this in 2013 and it captures the sandbox feel of the Whedon series better than any adaptation has a right to. You captain a ship, recruit a crew, take jobs (legitimate if you must, criminal if you can get away with it), and try to keep flying while Alliance patrols breathe down your neck. There is no fixed win condition. Each scenario sets its own goal, from accumulating wealth to completing specific story jobs across the 'Verse. The board sprawls across the table, a star map studded with planets and supply chains. It is a sandbox space western more than a tech meditation, but the Alliance reads differently now, a bureaucratic surveillance state running on data and hardcoded compliance. Expect three to four hours per session and a pile of expansions waiting if you love it.
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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