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💦 Welcome to Thinking Thursday, friend. This is a fun one. No meetings, no jargon, just the AI stuff worth trying this weekend. Come on in and make a Splash. Did someone forward this to you? Sign up here, it’s free.

HERE’S WHAT’S IN THIS ISSUE:

🎨 Turn your pet into an 1800s aristocrat.
🧠 Talk for 3 minutes, get your night back.
⚠️ The scam hiding in your voicemail greeting.
😏 Real or AI? (Be honest, you’d fall for it.)
🔵 Agents connect the dots.

Let’s kick things off with some trivia. Alex was 4, hurting, and every doctor had a different theory. So difficult. His mom, Courtney, typed his MRI notes into ChatGPT, plus one odd clue: He wouldn’t sit crisscross applesauce.

🏥 How many doctors had Alex seen before a chatbot played health detective with a fix? A) Four, B) Nine, C) 17, D) 83, if you count everyone on Facebook who “has a cousin with the same thing.” Keep reading, the answer is waiting at the end, wearing a little digital stethoscope.

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A few years ago, I paid an Etsy artist about $75 to turn our golden retriever Abby into royalty. Crown, velvet robe, the whole bit. It was a gift for Barry, and he still grins every time he walks past it.

You can do this yourself for free, in about 30 seconds.

Snap a photo of your dog, cat or chicken. (Yes, chicken. Trust me.) Open ChatGPT or Gemini. Both make images for free, with daily limits. Paste this:

Hit Enter and watch your mutt become Sir Reginald, Duke of the Sofa. Your tabby? Lady Whiskerton, Keeper of the Sunbeam. Your hen? Countess Cluckingham. Don’t like the title it picks? Tell it what to write.

Print it. Frame it. Hang it in the hallway and act like it’s always been there. Bonus points when a guest asks, “Is that a family heirloom?”

🩷 Love this idea? Post this in your group chat. Turned my dog into an 1800s duke with one free AI prompt. Kim Komando shows you how. Sign up free at GetKim.com.

AI assistants can book your dinner, a doctor’s appointment and, yes, your next trip. Hand one your credit card, and it’ll hunt fares, pick flights and click “buy” while you’re in the shower. (What could go wrong?) I’m curious where you land.

My bet? Nobody’s letting a bot pick the middle seat. I tried booking with AI once and missed my flight. Flight 404 could not be found.

Great question, Pete. Short answer: They’re cousins, not twins.

Google is the librarian. You ask, it points you to pages other people wrote. You click, you read, you decide who to believe.

AI is the well-read friend who never shuts up. It was trained on a mountain of text, learned how words fit together, and it can whip up a brand-new answer, a report or a picture within 10 seconds. But sometimes it makes stuff up with total confidence (like your brother-in-law at Thanksgiving).

Here’s the twist: The cousins are moving in together. Google puts AI-written responses at the top of your search results. So check where the answer came from before you trust it.

Stolen data? You’re not crazy. Authors and news outlets have sued AI companies over what they trained on, and one case settled for a whopping $1.5 billion. The courts are still sorting out the rest.

My take: Use Google to find sources. Use AI to explain, brainstorm and write. Trust, but verify.

I remember life before Google. Back then, every family had one drunk uncle who knew everything. Now we all carry him in our pocket.

A kid with a Minecraft channel bought ads using Dad's corporate card. Three weeks, $118,000, zero new subscribers. Dad tried selling "118K" merch, got roasted, threatened to sue his critics and lost the job that came with the card. Ouch.

This week: what happens when the machine is certain and wrong. A Florida crabber spent four hours in a freezing cell after facial recognition matched grainy McDonald's footage to his old mug shot. He'd never been to that city. Now he's suing.

Also: Google's AI hacking drill, 600,000 skimmed credit cards, Meta glasses that filmed a family for a week, a $418 EV charge, Apple's $95 Siri settlement, the IRS's new AI projects and a Home Depot shed turned Airbnb.

Plus, a cracked-open Flock camera, a TikToker launched by a 6-foot robot and Alaskan bears eating 200,000 calories a day.

Hit play to see what's watching you, what's quietly billing you and which bear gets your vote. 👇

▶️ Watch: Facial recognition failures, Flock camera leaks and $418 charging bills →

🎧 Or search “Komando” wherever you get your podcasts. I’m everywhere.

ElevenLabs just dropped a new AI voice model that can clone you from 10 seconds of audio. That’s shorter than your voicemail greeting. The cheapest plan is $6 a month. 

Legit uses? Sure. Audiobooks, dubbing, customer service bots. 

But scammers are drooling. ElevenLabs says clones need the owner’s consent. Crooks don’t ask permission, and copycat tools don’t check. They grab a clip from your Facebook video, clone your voice and call Grandma. 

“It’s me. I’m in jail. Please don’t tell Mom. I need bail money now.” She hears you crying. She pays.

Here’s what you need to know. Three moves, five minutes, tonight:

Pick a family safe word. Make it weird. “Purple walrus,” not your dog’s name. If “you” call begging for cash, the caller has to say it. Share it out loud at the dinner table, but never text, email or post it in a group chat. If a hacker gets into those, your secret isn’t secret anymore.

Hang up and call back. Scary call from a loved one? End it and dial the number you have saved. Real emergencies survive a 30-second callback. Scams don’t.

Ditch your custom voicemail greeting. Switch to the default robot voice. That’s one less clean clip of you sitting out there for free. Lock it down.

I love how people always leave voicemails when I miss their calls. It’s like they want to be ignored twice.

📩 Send this to someone who still answers every unknown call.

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Two friends, a bedroom, a lamp, a quick beauty tip, the kind of clip you scroll past 40 times a day. The old giveaways don’t help here. The skin has pores, the lighting is soft and every hand has five fingers.

So look somewhere else. Watch the earrings when heads turn. Watch the window. And listen to whether the lips land on every word.

Let me know what you think in the poll below and then see if you can spot AI.

Check out the video here.

OpenAI would like to give you a coworker who never sleeps, never takes PTO and, mercifully, can’t invite you to a “quick sync.”

Its new dots are always-on AI agents powered by GPT-6 Astra that can chase goals in the background, fix software bugs and message you through Slack or Teams. 

It’s like ChatGPT crossed with a Tamagotchi, except instead of you keeping it alive, it keeps your job alive. OpenAI imagines whole teams of dots working together. Great. Even the robots are getting middle management. 

You can read more about them here.

Share this now:

Here’s your haul for today. You found a smarter way to clear your brain, watched an AI video worth a double take, learned how to protect yourself from voice clones and enshrined your aristo cat. Thanks for making a Splash with me. Not bad for five minutes of reading. 

🩺 The answer: C) 17. That’s how many doctors Alex saw over three years before ChatGPT pointed Courtney toward tethered cord syndrome, a condition where the spinal cord is attached to surrounding tissue and can’t move freely. She took that suggestion to a new neurosurgeon, who spotted it on the MRI, and Alex got surgery, from which he’s recovering. Amazing!

My tip: AI doesn’t replace the doctor. It helped a mom ask a better question when nobody was providing answers. That’s the sweet spot. Helpful? Yes. Magical robot doctor? Absolutely not. But still, I have a friend with a son who has a dire condition. I just know AI will help him someday. I pray that it will.

💻 Technology doesn’t stand still: Neither do I. I researched every top VPN this year, and NordVPN came out on top. Fast enough that you’ll forget it’s running, private enough to trust with my family. Get 76% off here. That’s $3.37 a month plus four extra months. Comes with a 30-day guarantee too. *

🐾 The best tech makes someone you love laugh. Start there. Forward this to ONE person who needs to be with the AI program. Thanks for diving in, see you next Tuesday! — Kim

Kim Komando • Komando.com • 510+ radio stations • Trusted by millions daily

Photo credit(s): ChatGPT/Kim Komando, @MarcosBL via X, L LOHAS LED, OpenAI

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