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Moda is the AI design agent with taste
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Most AI tools tend to create what we call "AI slop": repetitions of the same colors, layouts and fonts. And when you try to fix it, you get stuck in a loop of re-prompting.
Moda is different. Drop in your website URL, and Moda learns your brand from the ground up: your colors, your fonts, your visual language. Then it helps you generate pro-quality slides, docs, and marketing assets.
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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
Google Teams with Ex-Machina Creators for Film Tools, Not Actor Replacement
TLDR: Google is investing $75 million into the film studio A24 to build AI tools that assist human filmmakers rather than replace them.
The Story: Google is investing $75 million into A24, the independent studio behind Ex Machina. The two companies are working together to build AI tools for film production and distribution. They are not focusing on AI-generated movies that make filmmakers uncomfortable. Instead, A24's tech team is already making an AI tool to help with storyboarding before filming starts. The goal is to give top creators better tools while keeping their creative control intact.
Its Significance: If you work in creative fields, this shows a welcome change in how major tech companies handle art. Instead of trying to replace human jobs with fully artificial movies, Google is paying to help humans do their jobs better. It means we might see more tools that assist with the hard parts of planning and editing, rather than tools that take over the whole process. This could keep more people employed while saving studios money on the boring tasks.
QUICK TAKES
The story: A new paper from Google DeepMind says fighting over whether artificial intelligence is conscious could cause huge political and social problems. Researchers say some people will form emotional bonds with these systems, while others will think the idea is absurd.
Your takeaway: As the technology gets more advanced, people will treat it differently. This disagreement will force courts and politicians to make decisions about machine rights for what is essentially still just software. It would be the equivalent of arguing about workers' rights for Microsoft Word.
Samsung Electronics brings ChatGPT and Codex to employees
The story: Samsung is giving ChatGPT Enterprise and the Codex coding tool to all its workers in Korea and its global device team. Employees will use the tools for writing software, planning marketing, and making new products.
Your takeaway: This is one of the biggest corporate rollouts ever. It shows that major hardware companies see this technology as a daily requirement for their workers, rather than just an experiment.
Microscopic image changes can bypass AI guardrails
The story: Researchers found that making tiny, invisible changes to images can trick vision models into breaking their safety rules. These small pixel changes make the system ignore its own guardrails.
Your takeaway: Safety rules are still incredibly easy to break. This means companies cannot fully trust these models in sensitive situations yet.
TOOLS ON OUR RADAR
📹 Guidde Freemium: An intuitive video documentation platform powered by artificial intelligence that instantly turns your software workflows into stunning visual guides for your entire team.
🖍️ Glasp Freemium: An incredibly useful browser extension that lets you easily highlight important quotes on any website and instantly share your curated reading list with a community of lifelong learners.
🧱 Walling Freemium: A highly visual project management tool that lets you organize your daily ideas and creative research into beautiful interactive brick layouts.
✅ Super Productivity Free and Open Source: An advanced daily task manager and time tracker that completely respects your privacy by keeping all your data locally on your machine.
TRENDING
Patch the Planet - OpenAI launched a new initiative called Patch the Planet to help open-source developers find and fix security flaws. The program pairs human security experts with a new AI model to test software and write fixes, which takes the pressure off small volunteer teams.
Getty Images announces display partnership with OpenAI - Getty Images signed a multi-year deal to bring its massive library of licensed photos directly into ChatGPT search results. This partnership aims to make AI searches more trustworthy, and the news caused Getty's stock to temporarily shoot up over 200%.
AI Memory Startup Raises $98 Million - A new startup named Engram secured massive funding to help developers reduce their processing costs. The company claims its memory systems can perform just as well as top labs while using up to 100 times fewer tokens, and it already has major customers like Microsoft.
University of Texas law dean shifts AI policy to prevent cognitive deskilling - UT Law Dean Robert Chesney changed school policies to ensure students still do the hard work themselves. The goal is to teach students how to use the technology without losing their own critical thinking and problem-solving skills.
New methods aim to make AI trustworthy - Researchers are developing new frameworks to make AI models more reliable for public use. These new methods are designed to help companies track how systems make decisions so they can catch errors before they reach users.
Recent developments in the AI landscape - New shifts highlight ongoing changes in how the public interacts with artificial intelligence. Tech companies are moving away from simple chatbots toward advanced tools that can handle more complex daily tasks for regular users.
TRY THIS PROMPT (copy and paste into Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini)
🎯 Build a weekly goal tracker with day-by-day scheduling, progress bars, and category breakdowns
Build a weekly goal tracker app. Features: add goals with category (Work, Health, Learning, Personal, Finance, Relationships), priority level (High, Medium, Low), day-of-week schedule toggles (Mon-Sun), check off goals as complete, weekly progress bar, goals remaining count, category breakdown panel showing done/total per category, filter by All/Active/Done. Dark lime green theme. 900px wide.
Set up to 3 goals per week with the days you plan to work on each one. Click a goal to mark it complete. The progress bar and category panel update in real time and make the memory persistent in my browser. What this does: A weekly planner where you set up to 3 goals, pick a category and priority for each, choose which days of the week you'll work on them, and check them off as you finish. A progress bar, goals-remaining counter, and category breakdown all update live as you complete things. You can filter between all, active, or done goals, and it's styled in a dark lime green theme.
What this looks like:
WHERE WE STAND(based on today’s news)
✅ AI Can Now: Help plan and storyboard major Hollywood films.
❌ Still Can't: Defend itself against tiny image changes that bypass its safety rules.
✅ AI Can Now: Fix complex security bugs in open-source software.
❌ Still Can't: Agree on whether it has its own consciousness.(it doesn’t)
FROM THE WEB
RECOMMENDED LISTENING/READING/WATCHING
Paprika (2006) - Movie
Satoshi Kon's final animated film, about a research psychologist who develops a device called the DC Mini that lets therapists enter and observe their patients' dreams, until three prototypes go missing from the lab and dreams start bleeding into the waking world. Christopher Nolan has been open about how much of Inception came directly from this, but Paprika is stranger, denser, and far more visually inventive. One of the most influential animated films of the 21st century and most Western audiences still haven't seen 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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