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💦 Welcome to your weekly AI charge-up. Another day, another AI plot twist. 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:

✈️ AI finds the cheapest way to upgrade a flight.
📸 Turn a phone pic into a polished profile shot.
🚀 Space elevators, spying TVs and Meta glasses.
🛍️ Smart tech upgrades worth the money.
🔒 Stop 3 major AI bots from training on your chats.
🐔 Chick Bongo makes AI job recruiters look ridiculous.

Let’s start with some trivia, shall we? Somewhere between Clippy asking if you’re writing a letter and ChatGPT writing your nephew’s wedding toast, the internet got weird. Everyone’s playing “spot the bot,” which is like Where’s Waldo, but Waldo keeps saying “goblin.”

✏️ What’s the tell that writing came from a chatbot? A) Em dashes tossed around like party confetti, B) Invisible characters your keyboard never typed, C) The “it’s not just a phone, it’s a lifestyle” sentence flip, D) The word “delve,” freshly exhumed from 1847. Keep reading, the answer is lurking at the end.

☎️ A cloned voice stole $66,000 from two homebuyers in 10 minutes. You won’t out-listen a machine. Coveron reimburses covered scam losses up to your plan’s limits, plus up to $2 million in identity theft coverage. It’s 71% right now, only $4.36 a month. I left LifeLock for Coveron and you should too.*

💦 Best deal on the internet: Splash is free. The research behind it very much is not. If one of the ads looks useful, click it. That tiny move helps fund all the digging, testing and fact-checking that lands in your inbox. — Kim

Brian and Wendy VanDoeselaar spent nearly a decade hunting for the right condo near Grand Rapids, Mich. Days before closing, an email arrived. Wire $66,026.92 within 24 hours to keep the closing on schedule. They were excited. The condo was perfect for them.

Then the phone rang. The voice confirming the instructions sounded exactly like their loan officer (paywall link). It wasn’t him. 

The couple wired the money, then heard nothing. When their real loan officer sent a statement the day before closing, they learned the truth. They’d been duped by a suspected AI voice clone, likely built from snippets of the loan officer’s voice on social media. Cost to the crooks, one fraud expert told CNN: free, or about $5.

A phone number two digits off. An email domain with two extra letters. And that oddly specific amount, down to 92 cents, made it feel real instead of fake.

The FBI says real estate scams stole over $275 million last year, up 58.5% in one year, and wired money is nearly impossible to recover after 48 hours.

The VanDoeselaars did what any of us would do under deadline pressure. That’s the point. And AI is making it easier for criminals to steal from you.

When the voice is right and the clock is ticking, you can’t count on catching the ploy. You can count on being covered. Coveron monitors your identity around the clock. 

If a scammer like this AI voice clone gets through, Coveron reimburses covered losses (phishing, impersonation, romance scams, unauthorized transfers) up to your plan’s limits, on top of up to $2 million in identity theft coverage.

✅ Get Coveron for 71% off, just $4.36 a month. → 

Don’t wait until you fall for a scam. Lock it down today.*

I took a photo of myself in kitchen lighting last week and looked like a woman being interrogated. Two years ago, that was a designer and a Photoshop afternoon. Now it’s a sentence.

OpenAI put out ChatGPT Images 2.5 last week, and the headline upgrade isn’t prettiness. The model is so much better at preserving the actual human in your reference photo. Older AI editors had a habit of evolving you into someone’s square-jawed, smoky-eyed attractive cousin. This one can keep your face while reworking the lighting, depth, background and color grade.

That matters if your face is part of your professional life.

Your LinkedIn photo, speaker bio, company site, social accounts, even the occasional selfie are all tiny pieces of your personal brand. You want you on a very good day, not you after an unexplained six-month sabbatical in a data center.

Avoid the mistake of asking AI to “make this look better.” Better how? Stop outsourcing taste. Ask like an art director:

Two warnings: Check the eyes and teeth first, every time. That’s where “nice headshot” can become “this person was assembled yesterday.” AI can still fumble hands, earrings, glasses and fine jewelry, too.

Let it do the heavy lifting on lighting, composition and color. Then take your pic.

Your move this week: Pick one photo you like of yourself and give it the professional treatment. If someone looks at the finished shot and immediately thinks “AI,” you went too far. The best edit should make them think you hired a better photographer.

📥 Send this to someone using the same headshot from when Bill Clinton was in office.

📺 WATCH ON YOUTUBE NOW OR LATER

Space engineers want to build an elevator to orbit. Not a rocket. An elevator running on a 62,000-mile cable, with a robot car crawling up at 120 mph for about a week before you reach the station. Press S for space and hope the stranger next to you isn’t a talker.

This week, we break down the gadgets quietly taking notes on you: Flock cameras logging your bumper stickers, LG TVs saving microphone audio in standby and Meta AI piecing together a family file from Grandma’s old posts.

Also: Apple’s $2,000 foldable iPhone, a Harvard PhD makes his own schizophrenia drug with ChatGPT, Uber support fails the potato test, AI Cat in the Hat threats get kids arrested and a VC says Pokémon cards will be post-apocalypse money.

Plus, a mom watches Meta AI build a profile of her kids, a woman learns her airport crush filmed her with Meta glasses, an 18-year-old grows a junk-hauling business to $15,000 a month and a roofer beats a fake-review shakedown.

Hit play below, so you can spot the cameras, the scams and the guy in glasses who’s a little too interested in your layover. 👇

▶️ Space elevators, spying TVs and Meta glasses →

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

As an Amazon Associate, some links pay us a commission at no extra cost to you. Keeps this newsletter free. Thank you.

🚗 Eyes up front: Clip this phone mount (35% off, $13) to your car’s air vent, so you can follow directions without looking down.

Don’t scratch that: Plug an insect bite healer (17% off, $25) into your phone and press it against the spot. Heat calms the itch in seconds.

🏃 Strap and sprint: Slide your phone into a breathable armband (23% off, $10) to keep it from bouncing around. Fits screens up to 6.7 inches.

Lint loves ports: Clear it out before you blame the battery. This cleaning kit (23% off, $10) packs 11 little tools, all tucked into a storage case.

🧑‍💻 Tech worth tapping: Find more smart bargains waiting in my Amazon storefront. →

I don’t need a stranger grading the deeply personal question I typed into a chatbot at 1:12 a.m., and neither do you. You don’t need to donate your existential crisis to science. 

ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini can use consumer conversations to improve their AI. Maybe that means some automated quality assurance system. In other cases, actual human beings review your stuff, unless you change the controls. 

The good news? You can shut that down. 

Setup takes about a minute, and my walk-through and the privacy fine print are one tap away.

⏱️ Do the 60-second setup. Steps here on my site! Don’t miss out. →

Meet Chick Bongo, perhaps the most qualified man who never existed.

He’s the creation of TikToker Graham Zip, who trolls AI recruiters by answering interview questions with nonsense like freight, cadence, walnut and raccoon protocols. The recruiter politely repackages everything into résumé-speak and eventually promises to follow up about next steps.

It’s like interviewing with a LinkedIn motivational post that gained sentience. This dystopian hiring system finally found its natural predator: one guy committed to wasting the robot’s time.

Check him out in action here.

Share this now:

Here’s your haul for today. You learned how to use AI to compare airline upgrades, turn an ordinary phone pic into a profile shot that actually looks like you and lock down your chatbot privacy settings. And you met Chick Bongo, the nonsense-spewing nightmare of AI recruiters. Not bad for five minutes of reading. 

🕵️ The answer: I tricked you. It’s all of the above. Sorry. All four writing quirks are chatbot tells. “Delve” is the loudest, showing a 654% jump in medical research papers in four years. The medicine didn’t necessarily change, but often the writers did. Invisible characters are the sneakiest, because they survive a copy-and-paste into anything. 

One for the road: An AI algorithm walks into a bar and says, “I’ll have what everyone else is having.” 

☎️ One more thing. The next scam call won’t sound like a scam. It’ll sound like someone you love. Coveron backs you up when your ears can’t, reimbursing covered scam losses up to your plan’s limits. I use and recommend Coveron.*

🪁 The best tools don’t make you smaller. They hand you back the afternoon. Forward this to ONE person who needs to be with the AI program. Thanks for diving in, see you next time! — Kim

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

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