💧AI no one told you

🙋‍♀️ Hello to you this fine Thursday, friend. Glad you’re here getting in the AI pool with me. Every technology has a moment when the world realizes it’s not the future anymore. It’s right now. The printing press took decades. The internet took years. Then something happened in late 2022 that broke every adoption record ever measured.

ChatGPT reached 100 million users faster than any product in history. How long did it take? A) 6 months, B) 2 months, C) 4 weeks or D) 5 days. Here’s a hint. Netflix took 3.5 years. Instagram took 2.5 years. TikTok took nine months. Make your best guess, and you’ll find the answer at the end, along with how much ChatGPT is making every month. Spoiler, it’s mind-boggling.

✅ Quick favor: If this landed in spam, your inbox owes me an apology. Drag it to your main inbox, and add me to your contacts. That tells your email provider you want this, and it keeps me out of the folder where fake PayPal invoices and “you’ve won a cruise” scams go to breed. One second of your time. Huge difference. — Kim

📬 Someone forwarded this? Smart friend. Every Thursday, I cut through AI noise and tell you what matters, what to try and what to dodge. Sign up free at SplashOfAI.com.

🎯 YOUR AI POWER MOVE

38 cents on the dollar

A listener named Carol wrote me. Her family lost their home in a wildfire. They got out safely. Everything else stayed.

When she filed her insurance claim, the adjuster asked her to list everything she’d lost. Room by room. With values.

Carol sat at her daughter’s kitchen table, because she didn’t have one anymore, and stared at a blank piece of paper. She couldn’t remember half of it. Her husband’s tools. The closet contents. Her mom’s collectables in a box. The stuff you stop seeing because it’s always been there.

Her adjuster paid 38 cents on the dollar because she couldn’t prove what she owned. 

📹 Time well spent

Here’s how 20 minutes this Sunday can help make sure you’re prepared for the worst.

Step 1: Film it. Open your phone camera and do a slow, narrated walk through every room. Open closets. Open cabinets. Go in the garage. Talk while you film: “KitchenAid mixer, Vitamix blender, Cuisinart coffee maker…” 

Step 2: Upload it. Go to ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude or Grok and upload the video, or break it into shorter clips. Videos are better, but photos room by room work, too.

Step 3: Paste this prompt:

Step 4: Save it in three places. Your phone. Your email. Google Drive, iCloud or Carbonite.* The list needs to survive even if your home doesn’t. A document in your desk does zero good when the desk is gone.

Step 5: Update it once a year. New TV. New appliances. Big gift. Nice watch.

📋 The step nobody tells you about

Email the finished list to your insurance agent before anything ever happens. They can spot coverage gaps while there’s still time to fix them. Your agent won’t ask for this. You have to offer it.

To make it easy, copy and paste this email and send to your agent:

The average American home contains $100,000 to $300,000 in personal belongings. Most people have no idea. Your insurance company is counting on that. Don’t give them the satisfaction.

Your move this week: This Sunday. One walk-through. Twenty minutes. Press record. I just checked my home insurance policy. Apparently if my blanket is stolen in the middle of the night, l’m not covered. (OK, I thought maybe you needed a smile after all that.)

👉 Know someone who recently bought a house or has been saying, “I really should document my stuff” for years? Forward this right now. It might be the most valuable thing they do all month, or year. Or use the snazzy icons below.

Email | Facebook | LinkedIn | X

💼 YOUR AI EDGE

Your LinkedIn is quietly costing you money.

My friend Paul hasn’t updated his LinkedIn since he got his current job. Three years ago. His headline still shows his old title. His summary ends with “passionate about results.” His last post was a congratulations to a coworker who left the company.

Recruiters searched LinkedIn more than 200 million times last year. Paul showed up in zero of those searches. He doesn’t know what he’s missing because nobody tells you when you get passed over.

That’s the thing about a bad LinkedIn profile. It doesn’t hurt. It silently fails you.

💼 Ten minutes with AI fixes this

Open ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Grok and paste this:

That fourth ask is the one that stings. In a good way. AI will find the thing you glossed over because it felt like bragging. 

Here’s what I got. 

“Your profile reads like a successful media career, but it undersells your founder’s journey. You didn’t merely ‘get a job’ in radio; you built a large national network because the established players (ABC/CBS) told you the internet was a fad. That is a massive ‘David vs. Goliath’ narrative. You are an expert in Media Transformation. You should lean harder into the fact that you alone predicted the shift from traditional broadcast to digital ecosystems long before the ‘suits’ did. That makes you not just a host but a Futurist and a Strategic Visionary.” Damn right! 😏

Your move this week. Pull up your LinkedIn. If your headline has the word “passionate” in it, that’s your sign.

👉 Know someone who’s been at the same job for years and wonders why recruiters never call? Send them this. It might be the most useful thing in their inbox today.

📻 PODCAST: THE KIM KOMANDO SHOW

In this episode: Bethany woke up covered in red spots and asked ChatGPT what was wrong. The AI told her to go to the ER immediately. It was right. Hear what it got right, what it got wrong and why the answer surprised her.

Plus, Karen wants to know if her smart speaker is listening when she argues with her husband. (Spoiler: kind of.) Andy Greenberg from WIRED takes us inside a Southeast Asian scam compound that will make your skin crawl.

And your Wi-Fi router can now detect movement through walls, which is either genius home security or the creepiest thing I’ve heard this month. Probably both.

🔈 Listen right now, and learn a ton

💰 AI DEAL OF THE WEEK

🎥 Pro-level setup: PIXY Dual-Camera 4K (41% off, $95)

You lean over. You grab something. Suddenly you’re a ghost in the corner of your own meeting. The EMEET PIXY fixes that.

• Dual cameras (one wide, one zoom) use AI to frame you perfectly in real time.

• Auto-follow tracks your movement, so you’re never half out of frame.

• Multi-person detection adjusts the shot automatically when others join.

• AI noise cancellation cuts keyboard clacks and background noise, so your voice comes through clean.

• Plug and play on both Windows and Mac, no software required.

It’s like having a tiny camera operator sitting on your monitor. Without the attitude.

✅ Get it now to save 41%, or $65, while it’s still on sale →

⚠️ THE AI TRAP

That voice on the phone is not your grandchild.

A woman in Florida, got a call from her grandson. Panicked. Scared. He used her nickname, the one only family uses. He needed money immediately. Please don’t tell anyone.

It wasn’t him. Scammers cloned his voice from social media. Two seconds of audio is all they need.

This isn’t rare. One in four Americans received an AI deepfake voice call in the last 12 months. Another 24% say they can’t tell the difference. That’s nearly half the country. And 77% of people who engaged with a caller lost money. Average loss: $1,298. One Michigan woman lost $26,000.

The old tells are gone. No broken grammar. No weird accent. The new scam sounds exactly like your family member. The nickname is right. The panic is right. Everything is right. Except it’s not.

🔒 Do this one thing today

Create a family code word. Pick any ordinary word nobody outside your family would know. Make a rule: Anyone frantically calling for money says the code word first. No code word, no money. No exceptions.

Text it to every family member.

🚨 If you get one of these calls

Never wire money or buy gift cards from a phone call. Any real emergency can wait 10 minutes. If someone says a family member is hurt, hang up and call that person directly on their saved number from a completely different device. Not a callback on the same line. A separate call. Scammers will try to keep you on the line. That’s part of the script. A second call breaks the spell.

The panic is the weapon. Slow down. That’s your defense.

👉 Parent or grandparent lives alone? Forward this and call them to agree on your code word. Five minutes. Do it today.

🤯 “I HAD NO IDEA”

That’s me in Pompeii. If you’ve never been, go.

In 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius buried an entire Roman library under 65 feet of volcanic ash. Hundreds of papyrus scrolls. The heat carbonized them instantly, fusing the layers into solid black cylinders indistinguishable from charcoal. Historians knew they existed. But touch them, and they crumbled. For 2,000 years, nobody could read a single word.

Then AI showed up.

Researchers used high-resolution CT scans and machine learning to detect microscopic ink patterns through still-rolled, still-sealed scrolls. No cutting. No unrolling. The AI read through the layers like an X-ray reads bone. 

And for the first time since 79 AD, someone read words sealed inside a burned scroll for two millennia.

🏛️ What it said

This is wild. Music, food and living life are among the highest goods available to a human being. Two thousand years under a volcano. First words back: Enjoy yourself. Really.

He’s not wrong.

The scrolls are from the Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum, once owned by the father-in-law of Julius Caesar, and the only intact library to survive from the ancient world. Researchers believe hundreds more remain buried, possibly containing lost works by Aristotle and Sophocles.

🏆 Wait. You can win money for this.

The project is called the Vesuvius Challenge, and it’s an open competition. They’ve already awarded over $1.7 million in prizes to people who crack pieces of the puzzle. 

The most recent winner took home $60,000. New prizes are still open. You don’t have to be a scholar. You have to be good with AI.

Read the decoded text and enter the challenge at scrollprize.org. Just because I can: What does a baby volcano say to his volcano mom? Magma. 🌋

🛠️ YOUR TOOL OF THE WEEK

Gemini Live

MY VERDICT

I run almost every day. My brain works there than it does at a desk. I’ve had ideas on those runs and lost half of them because the second I walked in the door, life swallowed everything whole. Argh.

A few months ago, I started taking Gemini Live on my runs. I’ll say: “What’s the most surprising angle on a surveillance pricing story?” We go back and forth. I push back. It adjusts. By the time I’m home, I have a full outline built from a conversation.

My best ideas in the last six months came from those runs. Speaking of, I was running down the street where the houses were numbered, 64K, 128K, 256K, 512K and 1MB. What a trip down memory lane!

Incredible. The app. Not my bad joke.

🫠 WTF (WHAT THE FUTURE)?

☀️ Night shift

This is unbelievable. You have to read this slowly to get it.

First, a startup called Reflect Orbital wants to bounce sunlight back to Earth using satellites with large adjustable mirrors. The concept has existed for decades. The problem was always aiming. Earth spins. Atmosphere scatters light.

Hitting a specific target from space requires constant real-time calculation across thousands of variables simultaneously. No traditional software could keep up.

AI can.

Imagine a party at your house or an emergency rescue effort at night. Wait, we need sunlight. You hop on an app, order sunlight and pay $5,000 a hour. The same AI helping you write emails is why a company can pitch “we will redirect the sun” with a straight face.

🌎 Cool? Yes. Until your neighbor wants more light at 2 a.m. Watch more about it here. This is def something you need to tell your peeps about.

🎤 KIM’S TAKE

The same technology that decoded a 2,000-year-old scroll, aims to bounce sunlight from orbit, helps people document their homes in 20 minutes and almost convinced a grandmother her grandson needed bail money? That’s what’s sitting in your pocket right now. Amazing, and frightening, times.

🚀 The trivia answer: B) 2 months. ChatGPT launched Nov. 30, 2022, and hit 100 million users by Jan. 31, 2023. The telephone took 75 years to reach that milestone. Television took 13 years. The web took seven. Netflix took 3.5 years. ChatGPT did it while most of us were still arguing about whether it was real.

And let me leave you with this unbelievable number. OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, is now making $2 billion a month. 

Speaking of startups, did you know that William Shatner once tried to start up his own line of lingerie for women? Unfortunately for him, Shatner Panties was a terrible brand name. (Oh that was so bad, I know.)

The gap between people who use AI and people who don’t is widening every single day. You’re on the right side of it. See you next Thursday with another Splash of AI. Thanks for being here! — Kim