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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
TikTok Can Now Spot AI Fakes of Your Face (There's a Catch)
TLDR: TikTok is testing an opt-in tool that scans the app for AI videos using a creator's face, but you have to verify your identity with a selfie and an ID first.
The Story:
TikTok is testing a Likeness Detection tool with a small group of US creators, and a TikTok spokesperson confirmed the test to The Verge. It's opt-in, so no one gets enrolled without choosing it. To turn it on, a creator first verifies their identity through a company called Jumio. That means a live selfie and an ID check. TikTok says it doesn't keep the ID documents, and the facial data is only used to match your likeness and find AI videos that use your face without permission. Once you're verified, TikTok scans AI-made content that might feature your face, and you can review the matches and report accounts that look like they're impersonating you.
Its Significance:
This puts TikTok right behind YouTube, which already gave creators a similar tool. If your face gets dropped into a fake video, one selling a scam product or spreading a lie, that can cost you followers, money, and trust. Now creators have a way to find those fakes and flag them instead of hoping to spot them by luck. The trade-off is real, though: you give a selfie and an ID to a third party before any protection starts, so you're handing over your face to defend your face.
QUICK TAKES
The story: SpaceX is in talks to sell the US Department of Defense billions of dollars in data center capacity to run AI models, according to the Wall Street Journal. SpaceX wants to compete with cloud firms like CoreWeave by offering that computing power at lower prices.
Your takeaway: SpaceX already rents compute to other big AI players, and now it's after the Pentagon too. The company known for rockets is becoming a place that sells raw AI horsepower.
The story: Netflix confirmed in a federal filing that it paid about $587 million in cash for InterPositive, the AI startup Ben Affleck founded in 2022. The tools help filmmakers fix and improve footage after shooting, like relighting a shot or cleaning up a scene, without making brand-new content from scratch.
Your takeaway: Netflix said it used AI in roughly 300 of its 2026 titles, mostly for shots that would've cost too much to film any other way. That's a big studio putting real money on AI as an everyday editing tool.
The story: San Francisco's city attorney sent Apple and Google cease-and-desist letters demanding they pull 13 AI apps that make fake nude images of real people without consent. The letters say both companies likely made millions in fees and should stop "aiding and abetting" the apps and cut ties with the developers.
Your takeaway: Some of these apps were rated fine for kids and easy to find by searching one word. Apple says it removed several and Google says it deleted hundreds, but the order pushes both to police their stores far better.
TOOLS ON OUR RADAR
🎵 Audjust AI Freemium: Drop in a song to shorten it, extend it, or find a seamless loop, or generate original royalty free music from a text description, no DAW or audio editing skill required.
🎬 iArt.ai Freemium: Describe what you want in plain language and get a polished animated motion graphic back, no timeline, no plugins, no After Effects experience needed.
🎙️ Wave Freemium: Press one button to record any meeting, call, or lecture and get a transcript with speaker labels and an AI summary, works across Zoom, phone calls, and in person.
📧 Flick Freemium: Swipe through your inbox one email at a time, archive, decide it needs no reply, or let AI draft a response, so a cluttered inbox actually gets to zero.
TRENDING
Scammers use AI to clone your voice and fake your caller ID - Criminals pull voice clips from social media and spoof caller ID to sound like a panicked family member who needs money now. The FBI says AI-enabled scams cost Americans nearly $893 million last year, and a family code word is one of the best defenses.
The Vergecast breaks down the Apple and OpenAI lawsuit - The show digs into Elon Musk's xAI suit accusing Apple and OpenAI of teaming up to keep rival AI apps out of the top App Store spots. Apple and OpenAI have asked a judge to throw the case out, saying their ChatGPT deal isn't exclusive.
Meta reportedly considers leasing computing power to Anthropic - Meta is in early talks to rent its spare computing power to AI lab Anthropic in a deal that could reach $10 billion over two years. If it happens, Meta turns its giant AI spending into a new income source and starts competing with cloud giants.
AI spam filters are getting fooled by an old-school trick - Scammers beat AI email filters with "text salting," hiding piles of harmless words like "puppy" and "book" inside phishing emails so the filter reads them as safe. Barracuda counted more than a million of these attacks since April.
AI now touches every step of drug discovery - A new review shows AI helping at each stage, from picking disease targets to designing molecules that reach human trials. The old problem remains: only about 1 in 10 drugs that start clinical trials get approved, and AI still has to prove it can lift that number.
TRY THIS PROMPT (copy and paste into Claude, ChatGPT, or Gemini)
◐ Say how worn down you are and what you've actually got this weekend. Get a two-day plan built to give something back, not another to-do list.
Build a single-file HTML app with vanilla HTML/CSS/JS. The Weekend Reset Planner — say how burnt out you are and what you've got, get a restorative 2-day plan. Persist to localStorage key 'weekend_reset_v1'.
Aesthetic: dark slate-green (#0f1417), sage (#7fa693) primary with sage glow top-left and lavender glow bottom-right. Jost sans for headings/activities, Cormorant serif italic for the "read," permission slip, and why-lines, JetBrains Mono for labels. Lavender (#a08cc8) for the permission-slip card, muted red (#d2786e) for the avoid card.
Form: burnout-level dropdown (running on fumes / tired but functional / okay want it to count), weekend-constraints textarea (obligations, who's around, weather, budget, social energy), optional what-recharges-you input, optional what-to-avoid input.
System instructions: design restorative two-day plans, not generic self-care listicles and not a disguised to-do list; balance real unstructured downtime with a few things specific to what THEY said recharges them; respect stated obligations exactly, place them in the right block; keep it loose (morning/afternoon/evening, not hour-by-hour); warm, kind, practical; no em dashes. Return raw JSON: read (2-3 warm validating sentences on what the weekend needs to do, not diagnosing), saturday (3 blocks: time, activity, why), sunday (3 blocks, same shape), permission (2-3 sentences giving explicit permission to skip/change the plan), protect (1-2 sentences on the one non-negotiable thing), avoid (1-2 specific sentences on what to steer clear of given their state).
Render: gradient "what this weekend needs to do" hero card. Two day sections (Saturday/Sunday) with a mono-labeled time gutter beside activity + italic why. Lavender "permission slip" card. Two-column split: sage "protect this one thing" and red "steer clear of." Copy plan + archive keyed by the read snippet.What this does: Pick your current state, list your real obligations and constraints, and optionally note what recharges you and what to avoid. It reflects back what the weekend actually needs to do for you, then lays out loose morning/afternoon/evening blocks for Saturday and Sunday, mixing real unstructured downtime with a few things specific to what you told you, not generic bubble-bath self-care. You also get an explicit permission slip to change or skip parts of the plan, the one thing worth protecting above all else, and a specific warning on what to steer clear of given your current state. Saves each reset to localStorage.
What this looks like:
WHERE WE STAND(based on today’s news)
✅ AI Can Now: Scan a whole video platform and match a creator's face against AI fakes made without their consent.
❌ Still Can't: Take those fakes down on its own. A person still has to review each match and file the report by hand.
✅ AI Can Now: Clone a person's voice from a few seconds of audio pulled off social media.
❌ Still Can't: Prove who's really on the phone. That still takes a callback to a known number or a family code word.
RECOMMENDED LISTENING/READING/WATCHING
Nophek Gloss by Essa Hansen - Book
A 2020 hard sci-fi debut about a young man whose planet is destroyed and who ends up crewing a mysterious ship that contains its own pocket universe, drifting through a multiverse where each bubble reality operates by slightly different physical laws. Alastair Reynolds called it "a sucker punch to the senses." Hansen worked as a sound designer at Skywalker Sound before writing this and the worldbuilding is unlike anything else in modern sci-fi, with AI-adjacent post-human intelligences woven all through the multiverse. First of a trilogy and criminally under-read.
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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