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💦 Welcome to AI Thinking Thursday, friend. Have some fun with this one. Let’s skip the meetings, can the jargon and try some worthwhile AI stuff. 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 house into a haunted Halloween postcard.
✈️ Google’s AI watches airfare while you do nothing.
⚠️ AI chatbot gives strangers your phone number.
😏 That viral restaurant disaster looks real. Is it?
🐈 The internet is being weird about Muse’s butt.
But first, some trivia. AI can beat grandmasters, crank out breakup poems and pass the bar exam like it studied between lattes. But hand a fancy humanoid robot this task, and suddenly, we’re watching a $2 million implode.
🛼 Which everyday job is one of the hardest things for AI and robots to learn? A) Bookkeeping, B) Sorting messy desktop folders, C) Folding laundry or D) Getting your teenager to text you back? Take your pick right now, the answer’s tucked neatly at the end.
🛡️ Hackers don't get the month off. October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month. Cute. The crooks trying to drain your bank account are aware all year long. I've run Webroot on my machines for years because it works quietly in the background and scans six times faster than the competition. No slowdowns, no nagging. Get 65% off now.* — Kim
🎨 TRY THIS TONIGHT
Image: ChatGPT/Kim Komando
Every October, our neighbor Linda turns her house into a haunted mansion. Fog machine, skeleton in a lawn chair, the whole bit. I’m pretty sure she spends more on a single Halloween than I’ve spent on the last five Christmases.
You can haunt your house for free, in about 30 seconds, without ever having to climb a ladder.
🎃 Haunt your house
Stand across the street, and take a photo of your house. Open ChatGPT or Gemini. Both make images for free, with daily limits. Paste this:
Turn this photo of my house into a spooky but charming vintage Halloween postcard. Add a full moon, twisted bare trees, glowing jack-o’-lanterns on the steps, a black cat in the window and fog rolling across the lawn. Write “Greetings from the [Last Name] Manor” in old-fashioned lettering at the bottom.
Hit Enter, and your split-level becomes the Addams Family’s summer place. Your condo? A gothic tower with one suspicious light on upstairs. Too scary for the grandkids? Tell AI to add friendly ghosts and swap the creepy trees for pumpkins.
Print the image on cardstock and mail it to the family, or make it your lock screen until November.
What do you use to plan a haunted house? Boo prints.
🩷 Love this idea? Post this in your group chat: Turned my house into a haunted Halloween postcard with one free AI prompt. Kim Komando shows you how. Sign up free at GetKim.com.
🎯 YOUR AI POWER MOVE
✈️ Google wants the window seat
Image: ChatGPT/Kim Komando
I love the idea of describing a Dublin trip to Google and letting its AI stalk airfare while I do absolutely anything other than opening six Chrome tabs to look at flight options.
That’s become a real thing. Google’s AI Mode will watch fares across more than 300 airlines and booking sites and email you when prices change. It’s free, and it works in more than 180 countries.
It won’t buy the ticket. AI Mode can’t book flights. Nothing gets reserved, nothing gets charged and you never hand over a card. You need to be signed into your Google account, so it knows where to send the email. That’s the entire permission slip.
💸 Put it on the case
Go to google.com, tap AI Mode and paste this:
Find round-trip flights from [your airport] to [destination], leaving around [date] and returning around [date]. Nonstop if possible, economy. Then track these flight prices for me, and email me when they change.
It’ll show you options and ask you to confirm the route, dates and filters. Confirm, close the tab, go live your life.
Sitting on American Airlines or Alaska miles? Add this:
Can I do this trip on my [airline] miles? Show me the miles and fees for nonstop flights on those dates.
It shows the price in miles. You still finish the booking on the airline’s site.
✉️ When the email lands: The alert is a tip, not a deal. Before you buy, check the bag fees. A cheap basic economy fare plus a checked bag is regular fare wearing a disguise.
If the price is the same, book on the airline’s website rather than a booking site. When a flight gets canceled or moved, you want to be the airline’s customer, not the customer of someone who has to call the airline for you.
⚠️ Another catch: AI Mode watches only the route and dates you gave it. The fare sale to Rome you didn’t ask about? It won’t say a word.
AI Mode can book your hotel. That’s a separate decision with its own fine print, and a story for another week.
📩 Send this to someone who has 16 tabs open comparing the same flight to Denver.
IN PARTNERSHIP WITH
Your cybersecurity checkup starts here
October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and here’s my question: When was the last time you checked the security on your devices? Think about everything you and your family do online: banking, shopping, schoolwork, email and staying connected. That’s a lot of personal information to leave unprotected.
AI is making scams, phishing emails and fake websites more convincing and harder to spot. And the threats keep getting harder to recognize.
That’s why I use Webroot Essentials. It protects PCs, Macs, smartphones, Chromebooks and tablets. Scans run six times faster than the competition, and Web Threat Shield automatically blocks risky websites before one bad click becomes a big problem.
Cybersecurity Awareness Month is a good reminder, but protection matters all year long. I trust Webroot Essentials to protect me and my family every day. And I negotiated a special offer for you: Save 65%, with plans starting at only $17.50 a year.
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🗳️TAKE MY QUICK POLL
Your spouse hands you an anniversary card. It’s beautiful. Funny, heartfelt, maybe even a little tear-jerky. You read it twice.
Then you find out ChatGPT wrote it.
Be honest. How do you feel?
I’m rereading every card I’ve ever gotten.
I’ll share the results (and the best reader confessions) in the next issue. And if you’ve used AI to write a card, tell me. Your secret’s safe with me. (Mostly.)
What happened to the skunks’ love letters? They scent them.
⚠️ THE AI TRAP
Image: ChatGPT/Kim Komando
Your number is the product
In March, a guy’s phone started lighting up with strangers asking about their payments. He doesn’t work at the service they were trying to reach. Gemini told them he did. It listed his personal number as the company’s customer service line.
He’s not alone. MIT Technology Review caught Gemini giving out a researcher’s cell number. ChatGPT dug up a professor’s home address, his spouse’s name and what he paid for a house. Grok has doxxed people. Claude shows up in privacy complaints, too.
The bot didn’t discover your number. That info’s been sitting for years in an old conference listing, a 2011 résumé, a people-search page you forgot existed. Some got scraped into AI training data.
🔒 Lock it down
Ask every chatbot you use:
What’s the phone number for [your full name] in [your town]?
Answers differ by bot, so try them all. You might not like the answer.
If yours shows up:
ChatGPT: Go to privacy.openai.com > Remove personal data from ChatGPT responses.
Gemini: Thumbs-down the answer > Report legal issue.
Claude: Screenshot result and contact Anthropic through privacy.claude.com.
Go after the source. Opt out of the big people-search sites one by one, and opt out of your carrier’s data-sharing programs. Your number is how your bank texts you login codes. Act like it.
📩 Send this to someone who keeps asking why you don’t answer unknown callers.
📻 MY NATIONAL RADIO & YOUTUBE SHOW
Another Flock camera misfire
A late-night strawberry lemonade run put seven officers in one man’s driveway. A Flock camera flagged him. A Wendy’s receipt got him off the hook. This week, we break down how it happened.
Also: Amazon’s $2.5 billion Prime settlement checks, McDonald’s letting AI price burgers at 14,000 restaurants, a booby-trapped photo hijacks your iPhone, and noise cameras mailing $2,500 tickets.
Plus, a $16,000 robot hand walks on its fingertips, and Luke 3D prints free mobility chairs for kids.
Hit play below, so you know who’s watching, what’s costing more and why you should keep your receipts. 👇
🎧 Or search “Komando” wherever you get your podcasts. I’m everywhere.
😏 REAL OR AI?
Image: @rourke_heath via X
A restaurant worker moves a giant tub of sauce, and it doesn’t go well. The mishap is shot like a movie: low angle, moody light, every second of dread.
Is this a real moment caught on a good-quality camera? Or was it redone by a professional for maximum comedic effect?
It’s AI. The spill is real, though. The original is a grainy security camera clip that went viral. Someone fed it into an AI video tool (ByteDance’s Seedance 2.5, inside an app called Magnific), and it rebuilt the whole disaster from an angle no camera ever had.
“Based on real footage” got a lot more slippery.
Check it out here. Bonus one of an Amazon delivery driver being chased by a dog.
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The companion app logs every sip and hands out points when you hit your goals. That’s how “I should drink more water” finally turns into a habit.
Right now, it’s $47, 15% off.* A smart little upgrade that keeps you on track all day.
🫠 WTF (WHAT THE FUTURE)?
Image: @alexandr_wang via X
🍑 The rear deal
Meta wants you to stop fearing AI and start thinking it’s adorable. Unfortunately, someone took lovable a little too far.
Meet Jolly, the squishy mascot for Muse, Meta’s AI assistant that can shop, email and tackle errands. You can customize its appearance and voice.
The internet posted memes showing Jolly’s generously proportioned backside. Think Tamagotchi meets thirst-trap influencer. Humanity spent decades worrying about robots taking our jobs. Nobody warned us about their butts.
Share this now:
🎬 END OF PROMPT
Here’s your haul for today. You turned your house into a haunted postcard, put Google’s AI on airfare patrol, checked whether chatbots know your phone number and met Meta’s over-endowed mascot. Not bad for five minutes of reading.
🧺 The answer: C) Folding laundry. For all AI’s “look at me, I passed the bar exam” energy, a crumpled T-shirt is enough to humble it.
This is Moravec’s paradox in action: The things humans do without thinking, like grabbing a sleeve, finding a corner and folding a towel while half-watching TV, can be brutally hard for robots.
Cloth bends, wrinkles, bunches up, hides its edges and refuses to behave the same way twice. My husband and I were arguing over whose turn it was to do the laundry. Finally, I threw in the towel.
🛡️ Cybercriminals upgraded: Your antivirus should, too. October is Cybersecurity Awareness Month, and AI is writing the phishing emails, building the fake websites and sending the scam texts. Webroot’s Web Threat Shield blocks them before you click. I trust it for my own devices. Plans start at $17.50 a year.*
🤓 You don’t have to know everything about AI. You only have to be curious enough to try one thing. That’s how every expert started.
⭐ How did I do today? Rate this newsletter below. Got an AI question bugging you? Type it in the comment box after you rate, and add your email address so my team can get back to you.
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
Photo credit(s): ChatGPT/Kim Komando, @rourke_heath via X, WaterH, @alexandr_wang via X
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