I’m hungry: Google’s new Food Mood AI tool generates recipe ideas. Tell it what you want (an appetizer, soup, main course or dessert), how many people are eating and two cuisine styles to combine. The Greek-Argentinian soup recipe it made for me looked pretty dang good.

Meet your new CAIO: LinkedIn says the number of companies with a designated head of AI has tripled globally (paywall link) in the last five years. The Chief Artificial Intelligence Officer oversees AI’s role in order to improve workforce efficiency (aka fire people), identify new revenue (sell more things) and mitigate ethical and security risks (CYA). You know it pays really well, too.

20M student papers included AI writing last year

That’s about 10% of the 200 million assignments analyzed. Oh, and about 6 million of those submissions were at least 80% AI-generated. Might be time to bring back the blue book.

Level up: OpenAI just launched GPT-4 Turbo, making ChatGPT sharper in writing, math, logical reasoning and coding. It’s now trained on public information up to December 2023. It’s for paying customers only; ChatGPT Plus, Team and Enterprise subscribers will get this upgrade.

📸 Don’t buy photo-editing software now: Starting May 15, Google Photos will open access to everyone for its free AI editing tools, including Magic Eraser, Photo Unblur, Portrait Light and Magic Editor. Android phones need to be running Android 8 or later to use these features, and iPhones must have iOS 15 or later.

eBay for fashionistas: Buying clothes is huge on eBay right now. The iOS app has a new AI-powered “shop the look” feature with a carousel of fashion looks on the homepage to shop. FYI, Android support is coming later this year.

Siri, clean my room: Apple’s next big idea: Robot butlers. Picture an AI smarty-pants to wash the dishes, clean the house and video chat with you when you’re not home. No word yet as to when it’ll be here. I have Amazon’s Astro patrolling my house. Give me a few weeks, and I’ll let you know how he’s working out.

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Your old photos are worth money to AI: Old public photo storage sites like Photobucket, Myspace and Friendster, which were huge in the 2000s, have a new revenue stream. AI companies will pay up to $1 per photo and $1 or more for videos to train their algorithms. With 13 billion pics on Photobucket, they stand to make $13 billion. Time to take a look at your old accounts and delete them.

Fakes on Facebook: Watch out for bogus ads and sites pushing phony AI image and video generators like Midjourney, Sora, ChatGPT-5 and DALL-E. Instead of limited access to cutting-edge features, you’ll get malware that steals your passwords and credit card details.

Sounds about right: Amazon’s “Just Walk Out” tech promised we could skip the checkout line using AI. Turns out, about 1,000 workers in India were watching live footage since the AI wasn’t up to snuff — 700 out of every 1,000 transactions needed a human check. No surprise, they canned the whole project.

AI bots can help you find a word that’s on the tip of your tongue but you can’t quite remember. Just prompt ChatGPT, Gemini or your fave with “Help me with a word I can’t think of.”

AI election interference: Microsoft confirmed what we all knew: China and North Korea are using bogus content on social media to influence your vote. They targeted Taiwan’s elections as a “test run,” using AI audio and memes to sway votes. This stuff works, folks. Don’t trust anything you see on social.

🚫 AI-witness: Here’s what not to do with a cellphone video in a legal case: Run it through AI to make it “better.” A Washington state judge threw out an AI-enhanced cellphone video as evidence in a triple homicide case. Lawyers for 46-year-old defendant Joshua Puloka hired a video producer to size up and sharpen the video, making it misleading and inaccurate.

The times, they are a-changin’: Google is going to start charging for AI search results. Gemini queries reportedly cost 10 times more than standard searches, with ad revenue from Google searches reportedly tanking. We’re seeing a huge shift in how we use the internet now. If you’re concerned about how this will affect your business, make an appointment to talk to me here.

🕷️ Creepin’ it real: A University of Nebraska-Lincoln student used AI and cheap mics to make a scientific breakthrough. He found wolf spiders prefer to signal to each other on top of crunchy, dead leaves instead of bark. Sounds small, but this kind of research used to take thousands of hours and lots of expensive equipment! Super cool.

New AI warning: If you use AI to produce content or provide legal, medical or other advice, you’re legally responsible (paywall link) for everything AI does for you. That makes you completely exposed and fully liable for whatever it generates — and AI makes a ton of mistakes. This is important for any business owner to know.

Hands-free upgrade: You can now ask Google’s Gemini AI for directions with your voice, and it’ll automatically open up Google Maps. Pretty sweet if you’re, you know, driving … or just lost and flustered. Works on Android 12 or higher or in the iOS Google app. 

Ads are coming: Perplexity, the AI search engine backed by Jeff Bezos and other big-name investors, will soon slip in ads where you’re most likely to click — on “related questions” that make up 40% of queries. Pay attention: The web as we know it is completely changing.

Are you a chatbot? Utah is the first state to pass AI legislation. Starting May 1, companies must clearly disclose if they use any AI that interacts with a person — think customer service, videos, phone calls, etc. If they don’t, they face fines of up to $5,000. But how will we know?

Get travel advice: When’s the best time to drive from [home] to [destination]? ChatGPT can flag info and considerations like mountain roads that ice over. It’s not perfect, but it’ll give you the basics.