AI NICKELBACK

World Cup, surveillance, tribalism and stickers

In the Blink of AI

What a treat to get the GM for ANZ at ElevenLabs - Damian Naughton

• Sucked in, scammers: A customer uses ElevenLabs voices to keep scammers on the line, gather intel, and build fraud prevention data

• Agent-to-agent comms: Damian reckons that increasingly, your AI agent will be talking to a brand's AI agent, not a human

• DIY intrinsic motivation: Damian advocates for self-selected stretch goals + co-designed pathways with his team

• 30 seconds: Did you know you can completely clone your voice in 30 seconds? That’s 4x faster than 2 minute noodles!

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Rant of the Week

AI models aren’t sports teams

Building your personal brand around ‘Anthropic’ or ‘OpenAI’ or even ‘I hate AI’ is worse for your career than wearing the losing team’s jersey on the train ride home

I say this as a hypocrite (!) - as I am typing this from a laptop covered in Anthropic stickers. Six months ago? ChatGPT girlie. Before that? Gemini

But I am a PROUD turncoat, and you should be too:

1. Your loyalty won’t be rewarded: Remember Blackberry? Loyalists made it their whole personality and then didn’t know how to touch type. Shame

2. Creating blindspots for the sake of ‘community’: The second you’re an “Anthropic person” you’ll dismiss evidence that something else works better

3. Even employees aren’t loyal: Anyone who has worked in tech will know its common to jump around: AWS → Google → Stripe → Microsoft → Anthropic. Nothing wrong with it, but if the insiders aren’t picking sides, why are you?

4. Apples and Oranges: Unlike all playing ‘soccer’ or ‘tennis’, some models genuinely are better at certain tasks and worse at others

5. Dicey politics and ethics: Remember when everyone said Elon was the second coming of Jesus, bought a Tesla, then had to put a sticker on their 60K investment ‘I bought this before Elon went crazy’. Being wedded to tech billionaires is risky business

Leave your tribalism to sports. Go Wallabies! (I think?)

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Steal This Before I Build It

I live outside of space and time. Here are my (genius) AI ideas:

• Flip the Brick: Why get a ‘brick’ when you could really get off the grid with a cheap flip phone and prepaid sim? Use it for after work hours, weekends and any time you wanna look fkn cool

• Nickleback Neutral: “Accidentally” played Creed on Spotify? Build a ‘wipe the cringe’ button before your crush asks to play something on your car bluetooth

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Where You’ll Find Me

• Australia vs. Ireland Rugby: Sydney, July 4th

• WADE Institute: AI Conundrum: Melbourne, July 13-15

• WorkTribes <> Influencing: Sydney, August 13

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Unsolicited Gifts

• The Strength of Being Misunderstood: Sam Altman wrote this 6 years ago, I discovered it this weekend. The man isn’t perfect, but I found this article to be exactly what I needed to hear

• Discount Code: The lovely people at WADE have given me a discount code for The AI Conundrum for 3 readers. First in, best dressed code: GH-AIC50

• Eros: Someone told me that this lazarus Deftones album leaked and I definitely don’t have a link. DM me

• The Wall Street Journal Podcast: Their harrowing episode about AI chatbot security is well researched and straight-faced

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Sticker Vote!

Only people with excellent taste read this newsletter, so I would really appreciate your thoughts on this important topic:

PS this poll only works if you open from your web browser - what an absolute rort! (Aussie slang: blatant scam, rip-off, or manipulation of the system to gain an unfair advantage)

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THANK YOU FOR YOUR ATTENTION TO THIS MATTER

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Today’s subscriber segment:

✨ Okay, doors closed ✨

• Behind the Scenes: I’ve been sitting on a new podcast format for a year. It could get me in trouble - you’re first to know

• YikesAI: I said I liked the Meta Ray-Bans on Instagram Stories and got absolutely roasted for it. Here's my defence and confession

• Conspiracy Theories: The US Government is now deciding which AI models the rest of the world gets access to. This started as a conspiracy theory and it isn't anymore