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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
Fake AI Reporters Published Crypto Scams in Forbes and HuffPost
TLDR: Four "financial journalists" who pushed specific crypto coins in Forbes, HuffPost, CoinTelegraph, VentureBeat, and other big outlets appear to be fake people made with AI, all linked to one crypto PR firm.
The Story: A new investigation by Press Gazette found that four prolific freelance writers with bylines in Forbes, HuffPost, CoinTelegraph, VentureBeat, Investing.com, and The Street likely don't exist as real people. The four names, Nikolai Kuznetsov, Reuben Jackson, Luis Aureliano, and Joe Liebkind, all use headshots that look AI-generated or are traceable to stock photo sites. All four also have ties to a PR firm called MarketAcross, which markets itself as doing PR for blockchain companies. Many of their articles told readers to buy specific cryptocurrencies, some of which were MarketAcross clients. One coin they pushed, called Gladius, collapsed back in 2017. None of the outlets that published these writers could prove they were real, and none of the four "writers" responded to questions.
Its Significance: Regular people use Forbes and HuffPost to make money decisions. If fake AI writers are pushing certain coins, readers are getting investment advice from the people secretly controlling the AI in the background. The FBI says AI fraud complaints jumped to 22,000 in 2025 with about $900 million in losses, up 33% from the year before. Before you trust a writer or take their money tips, it's smart to search their name plus "interview" or "podcast" and see if a real human shows up. Big outlets need to start checking too.
QUICK TAKES
The story: The Lord of the Rings director told a Cannes Film Festival crowd that he doesn't mind AI in filmmaking as long as actors agree to have their likeness used. He also said the AI debate is part of why Andy Serkis never won an Oscar for playing Gollum, since voters can't tell motion-capture work from AI work anymore.
Your takeaway: Hollywood's split on AI keeps getting messier. Jackson sees it as another tool, like green screens. Actors and unions see it as a job threat. If a name as big as Jackson is fine with AI clones (with permission), expect more studios to push licensing deals on actors going forward.
The story: Georgia Power is using eminent domain to take land and easements from more than 330 private property owners in rural Georgia to build high-voltage power lines for new AI data centers. The lines will feed a 829-acre hyperscale data center project called Project Sail. Georgia Power got approval in December 2025 to add nearly 10 gigawatts of new power, with about 90% of it earmarked for data centers, at an estimated cost of $16 billion over five years.
Your takeaway: AI data centers aren't just an internet thing anymore. They're showing up as power lines through people's backyards. If you live near a fast-growing tech corridor, this is worth watching. Even if you don't, your power bill might get pulled into it. Georgia residents have already seen their average bill climb $43 a month over two years.
The story: Anthropic released a new plugin called Claude for Small Business that runs automated tasks inside the tools owners already use, like QuickBooks, PayPal, HubSpot, Canva, DocuSign, Google Workspace, and Microsoft 365. It ships with 15 pre-built workflows for stuff like payroll planning, month-end book closing, chasing overdue invoices, and starting marketing campaigns. You approve every step that touches money or customers before it runs.
Your takeaway: Small businesses have mostly been stuck with AI tools built for big companies. This bundle handles the boring back-office work that piles up after hours, so a one-person shop can act more like a small team. If you run a side business or solo gig, the payroll forecasting and invoice-chasing workflows alone could save a few hours a week.
TOOLS ON OUR RADAR
📚 Kiwix Free and Open Source: A phenomenal offline reader that lets you download entire educational websites like Wikipedia to your computer or phone so you can read them without any internet connection.
🗺️ Organic Maps Free and Open Source: A highly detailed offline map and navigation application built by travelers that provides excellent driving directions and hiking trails while preserving your privacy completely.
🎧 Ardour Free and Open Source: A highly professional digital audio workstation that gives musicians and podcast creators all the essential tools they need to record edit and mix their sound tracks flawlessly.
🖨️ NAPS2 Free and Open Source: A brilliant document scanning application that works seamlessly with almost any printer allowing you to instantly digitize physical paperwork and save it directly as electronic documents.
TRENDING
New "Halupedia" Website Is Wikipedia Built Entirely from AI Hallucinations — Every link on the site triggers an AI to invent a brand new fake encyclopedia entry with fake citations, fake quotes, and fake academic sources, all written in a deadpan 19th century scholar voice. The creator says it's meant to show how AI can fake authority.
Fake OpenAI Repo on Hugging Face Stole Passwords from 244,000 Downloads — A fake repository called "privacy-filter" copied OpenAI's real model page word for word, hit #1 trending on Hugging Face, and pushed malware that grabbed browser passwords, crypto wallet keys, and Discord tokens before getting pulled.
Perplexity Explains How It Built Security Into Its Comet AI Browser — The company laid out how it's trying to stop prompt injection attacks, data leaks, and rogue agent behavior in its AI browser, which can act on your tabs and accounts. Independent researchers have already found bugs in Comet, so this is a response as much as a roadmap.
NV Energy Cutting Power to 49,000 Lake Tahoe Residents to Feed Data Centers — Nevada's main utility told a small California utility that supplies Lake Tahoe that it'll stop providing 75% of the area's power by May 2027 so it can serve Google, Apple, and Microsoft data centers near Reno. Tahoe has less than a year to find a new power source.
TikTok Launches MCP Server So AI Agents Can Run Ad Campaigns Without Humans — TikTok joins Google, Meta, and Amazon in opening up its ad platform to AI agents. Agents can now plan, launch, and tweak campaigns on their own, including setting bids, shifting budgets, and changing who sees ads.
Recursive Raises $650 Million to Build AI That Improves Itself — A new lab founded by veterans from OpenAI, DeepMind, Meta, and Salesforce just came out of stealth at a $4.65 billion valuation. Their plan is to build AI that runs its own science experiments to make itself smarter, starting with AI research, then expanding to physics, chemistry, and biology.
Former Meta News Chief Campbell Brown Wants to Audit What AI Models Say About Politics and Health — Brown's new company Forum AI is recruiting experts like Niall Ferguson, Fareed Zakaria, and Tony Blinken to grade how AI models handle messy topics like geopolitics, mental health, and hiring. She thinks foundation model companies care too much about coding and math benchmarks and not enough about what AI says on sensitive topics.
TRY THIS PROMPT (copy and paste into Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini)
⚖️ Make your strongest case for anything. Get the most intelligent possible argument against it.
Build a single-file HTML app using vanilla HTML, CSS, JS, and one API call. Create The Devil's Advocate — a tool that constructs the strongest possible opposition to any argument. Use localStorage key 'devils_advocate_v1'. Make the visuals match the content: dramatic courtroom aesthetic.
Aesthetic: near-black (#0e0a06) with a dramatic red spotlight radial gradient from above, vertical wood-panel line overlay, full vignette. EB Garamond serif for all body text, Oswald condensed sans for labels and headings, Courier New monospace for metadata. Deep crimson (#c83c14) and aged gold (#c8a050) accents. The form panel has a 3px crimson top border. Arguments have a crimson left-border stripe.
Form: large textarea for the claim/position (argued as strongly as possible), domain dropdown (7 options), confidence level dropdown (4 options), optional evidence input. A dramatically styled "Summon the Opposition" button.
Call the API instructing it to steelman the opposition — no strawmanning, find the best most inconvenient arguments. Return raw JSON: vulnerability (Low/Moderate/High/Critical), opening (dramatic framing statement), arguments array (type, title, body, weakness — honest concession of where this argument itself is weakest), closing (powerful synthesis), what_survives (honest assessment of what holds up).
Render as a courtroom document: a docket header with case number and vulnerability badge (color-coded), an opening statement section with large quote mark watermark, numbered argument cards with type label and title in Oswald, body in Garamond, concession line in italic at the bottom, a closing argument section, and a "what survives" section showing what part of the original position is actually defensible. Save to localStorage with auto-incrementing case numbers. Make it work in a single HTML file.What this does: State any belief, position, or argument as strongly as you can. The Devil's Advocate constructs the most formidable opposition case possible — no strawmanning, no easy targets. It opens with a dramatic framing statement, builds 4–5 distinct arguments across different attack types (Empirical, Logical, Historical, Ethical, Practical, Psychological), honestly concedes where each argument is weakest, closes with the most powerful synthesis, and ends by identifying what part of your original position actually survives scrutiny.
What this looks like:
Attio - the AI CRM for modern businesses.
Attio is the AI CRM that keeps you ten steps ahead.
Ask Attio anything. Where should I focus? What deals are at risk? Search, update, and create across your customer data.
Ask more from CRM. Ask Attio.
WHERE WE STAND(based on today’s news)
✅ AI Can Now: Run a small business's payroll, invoice chasing, and month-end book closing through approved automated workflows
❌ Still Can't: Be trusted as a financial journalist without human editors checking the byline is a real person
✅ AI Can Now: Plan, launch, and optimize ad campaigns on TikTok end to end through agent connections
❌ Still Can't: Be safely downloaded from open repositories without checking the publisher, as fake OpenAI models prove
FROM THE WEB
@advkiki I solved titanic problems 🚢 #titanic #ai
RECOMMENDED LISTENING/READING/WATCHING
Rainer Werner Fassbinder made this German TV miniseries about a cybernetics researcher who starts to suspect his world is a computer simulation full of digital identity units who don't know they're not real. Predates The Matrix by 26 years, predates the simulation hypothesis as a serious philosophical position by even longer. Sat unwatched for almost four decades until a 2010 restoration, and it's still one of the most prescient films about AI ever made.
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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