AI for Consumers - 20250610

What went on this week with AI, and how it affected (non-)consumers.

Jun 11, 2025

Top 10-ish Articles

Society

What’s the appeal of AI? It will always reassure you
Zoe Williams, Guardian
AI chatbots like Claude and ChatGPT give gentle, nonjudgmental responses—“I’m sorry this happened to you”—that offer comfort and boost confidence, even if those messages are formulaic. See also Your favorite AI chatbot is lying to you all the time and What Happens When People Don’t Understand How AI Works.

News outlets in crisis mode as Google-led AI search push crushes website traffic
This report highlights that Google’s new AI tools, like AI Overviews and AI Mode, are providing direct chatbot-style answers instead of links, which has caused big drops in web traffic—over 50%—for publishers such as The Atlantic, HuffPost, and Business Insider.

San Francisco cops are using AI to write police reports
Jonah Owen Lamb, San Francisco Standard
The SFPD is piloting AI software called Draft One to draft initial versions of police reports from bodycam audio for certain misdemeanors, but critics worry it could introduce mistakes and transparency issues.

The video game actors’ strike may be over soon
Jess Weatherbed, The Verge
SAG‑AFTRA reached a tentative deal with major game companies after nearly a year of striking over protections against AI misusing performers' voices and likenesses, with new "guardrails" included pending final approval.

Discoveries

A generative approach to speeding drug approvals with AI
Moz Farooque, guru focus via yahoo
The FDA is using a new AI tool to help scientists flag uncertain results in drug applications and speed up approval processes. See also F.D.A. to Use A.I. in Drug Approvals to ‘Radically Increase Efficiency’.

Doctors Report the First Pregnancy Using a New AI Procedure
Zach Winn, MIT News
A tool called Themis AI helps systems know when they might be wrong, improving trust and usefulness in areas like healthcare and science.

Economics and Law

How scammers are using AI to steal college financial aid
Sharon Lurye, AP News
Scammers are using AI to create fake "ghost students" who enroll in online college courses under stolen identities just long enough to collect financial aid money, leaving real students out and victims saddled with fraudulent loans, with California alone losing over $11 million in 2024.

Politics

AI Chatbots Are Making LA Protest Disinformation Worse
David Gilbert, WIRED
During protests in Los Angeles over ICE raids, people relied on AI chatbots like Grok and ChatGPT to check facts—but these bots often provided wrong or misleading information, which made the spread of disinformation even worse. See also Fake Images and Conspiracy Theories Swirl Around L.A. Protests.

Emperor Palpatine reads Trump tweets in viral AI video
Tom Tapp, Deadline
California Governor Gavin Newsom shared an AI-generated video featuring the voice of Star Wars villain Emperor Palpatine reading President Trump’s tweets, mocking his military-focused messages and escalating their public dispute.

The Pentagon is gutting the team that tests AI and weapons systems
James O'Donnell, MIT Technology Review
Mitigators say the Pentagon is cutting staff in its key weapons and AI testing office to just 45 people, undermining independent safety checks and potentially letting unproven military AI systems reach the battlefield unchecked.

Trump team leaks AI.gov government plans on GitHub
Brandon Vigliarolo, The Register
A staging version of AI.gov was accidentally made public on GitHub, showing the Trump administration plans a new federal AI initiative that includes a chatbot, a universal API to link agencies with models from OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic, and a console to track AI deployment—all due to launch on July 4. Led by former Tesla engineer Thomas Shedd, the project aims to modernize government IT and automate agency work under an "AI‑first" strategy.

Technology

2025 CNBC Disruptor 50: See the full list of companies leading new era of AI breakthroughs and riches
CNBC
The Disruptor 50 features fast-growing private companies powered by AI, with top firms like Canva, Anthropic, Databricks, OpenAI, and Anduril combining for nearly $500 billion in valuation.

Apple Researchers Just Released a Damning Paper That Pours Water on the Entire AI Industry
Victor Tangermann, Futurism
Apple researchers argue that the latest AI “reasoning” models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google can’t actually think—they fail complex puzzles and grow more inaccurate as problems get harder, revealing serious limits hidden by current benchmarks.

Ranked: The Smartest AI Models, by IQ
Visual Capitalist
An IQ-style test from Mensa Norway was used to compare 24 top AI models—finding that while leading models score high, no AI yet matches human intelligence across all types of reasoning tasks.

International

China shuts down AI tools during nationwide college exams
Jess Weatherbed, The Verge
During China’s gaokao exam (June 7–10, 2025), tech giants like Alibaba, ByteDance, Tencent, and Moonshot temporarily disabled AI chatbot features such as photo-recognition and Q&A to prevent cheating and keep the tests fair.

Stocks

5 Things to Know Before the Stock Market Opens
Yahoo Finance
Google’s new AI features—like AI Overviews and AI Mode—give direct answers instead of links, which caused web traffic for publishers like The Atlantic and Business Insider to drop by over 50%.

Apps to check out

AI Bots

Anthropic / Claude AI

Anthropic's Prompt Engineering Interactive Tutorial
This is a hands-on, chapter-based course that teaches you how to write better prompts for Claude through practical exercises, starting from basics to advanced prompt techniques. It walks you through nine lessons—like structuring prompts, avoiding hallucinations, and creating complex workflows—to improve your AI interactions.

Apple Intelligence

Apple Intelligence: WWDC 2025 AI Updates Fall Short
Ina Fried, Axios
At WWDC 2025, Apple introduced modest AI enhancements, including a 3 billion-parameter on-device model and expanded developer access to Apple Intelligence. However, the company did not provide updates on previous AI promises, such as a revamped Siri, and analysts have expressed concerns about Apple's pace in the AI race compared to competitors like Google. See also It’s Time to Kill Siri and Apple Just Showed Off a New Look for iPhones. Here’s Everything Coming in iOS 26.

Coding

CodeSquire.ai
CodeSquire.ai is an AI code-writing assistant that turns your comments into code, offers smart completions for data science and engineering tasks, explains complex functions, and supports environments like Colab, BigQuery, and JupyterLab.

Common Pile
The Common Pile is an 8 TB collection of public-domain and openly‑licensed text from 30 diverse sources, designed for training large language models with transparency and ethical standards. Two 7 B‑parameter models trained on this dataset match the performance of similar models trained on unlicensed data, proving that open datasets can produce high-quality AI.

CodeConvert.ai
CodeConvert.ai is a web tool powered by AI that instantly converts code between over 25 languages—just paste your snippet and click a button to switch from, say, Python to JavaScript—with no setup or downloads needed. It offers limited free conversions, high-quality translation, and privacy by not storing your code.

Data analysis

Chat4Data
Chat4Data is a Chrome extension that lets you scrape structured web data by chatting naturally with any website, handling pagination, and exporting results to Excel—no coding needed, with free starter tokens.

Hardware

XNote: AI‑Powered Smart Writing Set
XNote combines a real pen, notebook, and app so your handwriting is instantly captured digitally and made searchable, editable, and even chat‑ready with AI features like summaries and task detection.

Fieldy.ai
Fieldy.ai is a wearable AI note‑taking device that records conversations and instantly turns them into searchable transcripts, summaries, reminders, and organized memory logs—all hands‑free.

Images

Pikaso
Pikaso is a real-time AI sketch-to-image tool that lets you draw simple lines or shapes and instantly turns them into polished images with adjustable creativity and added elements. It’s easy to use, works with sketches, icons, webcam input, and offers features like playback, upscaling, and background removal.

DreamUp by DeviantArt
DreamUp is an AI art tool that lets you create images from text prompts, while giving artists control over their work—prompts are free, outputs are labeled, and creators can opt in or out of dataset training. Free to begin.

Masterpiece X
Masterpiece X lets you create full 3D models from just text or images using AI, offering ready-to-export, textured assets, a developer API, and creative tools—all without needing 3D expertise.

Thiings Collection
Thiings offers a visual library of “things”—like objects, places, animals, and tools—with simple definitions and images to help users explore and learn about everyday items. Free.

West Idol
West Idol is an AI service that turns a single selfie into a range of professional-quality images, with features like text-to-image, background removal, upscaling, and inpainting—all in seconds using pre-made templates.

Images / Video

Kling AI
Kling AI is a creative studio that uses AI to turn text or images into high-quality videos and images, offering tools to script, storyboard, animate scenes, and control camera movements in a single platform.

Jobs

JobJump: AI Interview Copilot
JobJump is an AI-powered assistant that listens to your video interview questions and provides real-time, tailored answer suggestions based on your resume and job details. This tool works across Zoom, Google Meet, and Teams, offering transcripts, performance feedback, and post‑interview analysis to help users prepare and respond confidently.

Miscellaneous

Wordkraft.ai
Wordkraft.ai offers more than 60 AI tools and over 70 templates to quickly create SEO‑friendly content (blogs, ads, emails) and generate original images—all from a simple, easy‑to‑use dashboard.

Portraits: personalized AI coaching built alongside real experts
Google Labs experimental Portraits feature uses AI to mimic experts like Kim Scott, offering advice in her voice and style for leadership and communication.

Mapify: AI Mind Map Summarizer
Mapify is an AI tool that turns documents, videos, websites, and text into clear, interactive mind maps in seconds by using powerful models like GPT‑4o and Claude 3.5.

Spreadsheets

Hugging Face Sheets
Hugging Face Sheets is a spreadsheet tool powered by AI that lets you build, edit, or enrich tables using natural language prompts, open-source models, and real-time web search—all within a familiar sheet interface.

Travel

MagicTrips.ai: Personalized AI travel itineraries in seconds
MagicTrips uses AI to quickly build custom travel plans based on your destination, trip length, budget, and interests—even without signing up.(magictrips.ai, travelmassive.com)

Video

MakeShorts.ai
MakeShorts.ai uses AI to quickly turn YouTube videos into social media-ready short clips by auto-selecting highlights, cropping, adding subtitles, and generating captions in one click. It's a simple tool that makes creating engaging short-form content fast and easy.

Web

Limecube
Limecube is an AI-powered website builder that creates a complete, responsive site in about 60 seconds using smart design, AI-written content, and curated images, all customizable via an easy drag-and-drop interface.(limecube.co)

How To Build the PERFECT Website Using AI (Step-by-Step for Beginners)
The video shows how to build a complete, professional website with just AI tools in a few easy steps—no coding needed. It walks through designing, populating, and customizing a site using AI for layout, content, and images in minutes.

Note: Much of the text is generated by ChatGPT 4o and by Gemini.

AI for Consumers