Claude Duet + This Week's Best Stories

Happy Thursday!

Hope you're having a good week so far 😊

Thanks to the kind people who responded to last week's poll about whether you preferred a longer or shorter email from me. The consensus was: depth is good, tighten it up slightly. So I have.

The breaking news last night was that Claude Duet is here, and that now means that all the major AI labs have an always-on personal assistant. I haven't got access to it yet, even with a VPN, but will be reviewing that on my socials as soon as it's available.

More on that below.

Let me know which AI agent you currently use, and I'll share the results next week.

In this issue

ChatGPT updates: presentations, better Pro and a PIN lock
A few useful updates to ChatGPT this week. You can now create presentations in Space, edit the slides directly and work on them with other people. Export to PowerPoint, PDF or Google Slides when you're done.

GPT-6 Pro has also improved, with faster responses and the ability to split a bigger job between agents working in parallel. And you can lock individual chats behind a four-digit PIN or your device's authentication. Handy if your conversations contain things you'd rather weren't sitting there in plain sight. OpenAI.

Talk your way to a Google Doc
Docs Live lets you talk through an idea on your phone and turn it into a structured document. It can ask questions and pull in relevant context from Gmail, Drive and Chat.

So you could come out of a meeting, ramble through what was agreed, and have the beginnings of a brief or proposal before you've forgotten half of it. Much more useful than dictation that faithfully captures every 'erm' and unfinished sentence.

It's in Google Docs on Android and iOS, on supported paid plans. Google.

Always-on personal agents are here
Claude Duet launched last night. That means Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Meta and xAI now all have always-on personal agents.

If you've never used one, it probably feels quite weird at first. I'm sure you’re wary of giving these things access to your email, calendar, meeting notes, files etc.

But I’m a total convert - once you have these agents pointing out things you were supposed to do or things you didn't notice, it's a real revelation.

My ChatGPT Dot is so good at that. Just the other day, it pointed out that one of the Dropbox links in a client email that I'd sent was pointing to the wrong file! That's the level of pro-active, unprompted nannying that they can do for you, and it feels really nice!

Duet joins ChatGPT dot, Gemini Task (formerly Spark), Grok Bot and Meta Muse, plus independents like Instinct. This is clearly where AI is going, and I would encourage you to try Dots, Duet, or Grokbot to get started. You can read my full comparison that I will keep updated, here.

Gemini Notebook (FKA NotebookLM) gets even more useful
Gemini Notebook (the artist tool formerly known as NotebookLM) now gives you more say over its slides and videos before it makes them. You can review the outline, change the structure and steer the style, rather than wait for the finished thing and start picking it apart.

A small change, but an important one. The impressive-looking AI presentation that completely misses your point is becoming a familiar workplace artefact. Letting us get the thinking right first should save a lot of that. Google.

Hacking your spyware-filled TV this weekend?
Last week it was free, vibe-coded Adobe and Office alternatives. Now people are using Claude to strip ads, tracking and bloatware out of their TVs.

CleanYourTV gives Android and Google TVs a simpler home screen. This feels like the start of something massive: people reclaiming technology from companies that locked it into subscriptions or surveillance advertising.

The 'piracy renaissance' is well underway people! Tools like Reverse Engineer Anything are making software easier to take apart and rebuild. Who knows where this will end for any company that makes either software or hardware that, in some way, runs software TV cleanup · REA.

ChatGPT will start rewriting your ads
From 30 October, ChatGPT's self-serve ad campaigns will have 'creative enhancements' switched on by default. That means OpenAI can rewrite your headlines and descriptions, resize images, translate copy and change destination URLs, without you approving every version.

You can opt out in the ad account settings. We've seen this direction of travel with Google and Meta, and now it's arriving here too.

I would be wary of this. You've probably seen the scorn directed at brands like the National Trust recently, where they used a similar feature in TikTok ads. It created a lot of sloppy AI ads on their behalf without their oversight and showed them to people… who weren't happy.

The details.

Creators make Marriott’s global campaign in four weeks
Marriott Bonvoy got campaign content from 23 destinations, covering 14 hotel brands, made in four weeks (and probably at less expense than usual). Not bad!

It used Beautiful Destinations' creator network as a production team, with a brief for something less polished and more like an actual guest's experience. Crumpled sheets, half-eaten meals, that sort of thing.

The campaign started in September; this week's account explains how they made it.

Another reminder that creators aren't just people you pay to post an ad. They can be the people who make the whole campaign. How it worked.

LinkedIn brings back the business card
LinkedIn is rolling out digital business cards that you can customise, put in your phone's wallet and let someone scan when you meet them.

Your photo, job details and profile link, without the awkward name search in a noisy room.

It's a fairly obvious idea, but a useful one if you go to events or meet clients. And refreshingly, a LinkedIn feature that helps you do something in the real world rather than spend another twenty minutes scrolling everyone's least favourite social network. The cards.

Edits gets a paid option
Meta has shared more about Edits Plus, the paid option for its CapCut rival.

Interesting because, FYI, CapCut has not avoided the wave of people vibe-coding free versions of apps with annoying subscription paywalls. I'm not sure now is the best time to try and monetise an alternative tbh.

Anyway, the benefit of paid Edits is 200GB of cloud storage for backing up and moving projects between devices on the same platform (iOS to iOS, or Android to Android).

More AI usage is part of the pitch too, but pricing hasn't been announced.

The free app will stay free, apparently. Edits Plus.

Instagram has an AI-copycat problem
Adam Mosseri says Instagram needs stronger protection for creators whose work gets copied with AI.

He's also clear that AI-made content isn't automatically penalised in the feed. So the platform wants us using its AI tools, whilst trying to stop those tools being used to rip people off.

As a professional creator myself, I have to deal with copycats, both human and generative AI. I also see firsthand how much that even an audience who's interested in AI dislikes AI-generated content (unless it's for silly reasons like dancing cats).

So it always surprises me that the platforms haven't got clearer policies against AI-generated content. But, of course, things like Instagram and YouTube are owned by companies who see AI as the key to their future, and so it must be embraced and turned into features everywhere 😔

Mosseri’s comments.

The Wall Street Journal listens to 25 million TikToks
The WSJ has an AI tool called Doppler that has analysed 25 million TikTok videos and around 500,000 podcast episodes to find what people are talking about ahead of the US midterms.

Its journalists use that to spot themes and questions they might otherwise miss. It's social listening on a ridiculous scale. I find this much more interesting than asking AI to write another article: use it to notice something, then have people investigate. TikTok isn't a representative opinion poll, of course, and the team audits the results. How it works.

Spotify clears out the slop, and invites AI remixes
Spotify says it has kept more than 50 million slop and spam tracks out of recommendations this year.

Meanwhile, Believe and TuneCore have signed up to its planned AI remix and covers tool, with artists choosing whether to participate and earning royalties. The tool will be a paid extra for Premium subscribers.

So AI music is being filtered out with one hand and brought into the business with the other. The difference is permission, payment and whether anyone actually wants to listen. The cleanup · The deal.

Social shopping edges past search at The Independent
The Independent says its social-commerce revenue narrowly overtook its search-led commerce revenue in September.

That's the money from shopping recommendations, and the gap was small, but it's an interesting milestone. Publishers spent years building pages to catch people searching Google for what to buy.

Now a trusted recommendation in someone's feed can bring the sale instead. We talk a lot about disappearing search traffic. This is a useful example of a publisher finding something to do about it, rather than just watching the graph go down. The account.

PHP security alert: check with your web host
Two critical flaws in PHP, the language behind WordPress and a huge number of other websites, could let attackers run code on a vulnerable server without logging in.

Fixes were released yesterday. If you run a website, ask your host or developer to confirm the server's PHP has been patched ASAP. Updating WordPress or its plugins won't fix this on its own. It's the software underneath that needs updating. Definitely one to forward to whoever looks after your site, like right now. PHP Foundation · WordPress.

SimCity, but the neighbours object
Permit Pending is a free browser game where you build a city, except every improvement has to survive planning hearings, objections, lawsuits and elections. Put up some flats and homeowners complain.

Cut the building down and it no longer makes financial sense. Meanwhile rents keep rising and everyone blames you.

No account or download needed. Might be a fun distraction this lunchtime. Play it.

IKEA instructions you can actually turn around
Someone has turned the BILLY bookcase instructions into an interactive 3D build.

Step through the manual, rotate the pieces and see what goes where, instead of staring at a drawing wondering which way round you're holding the shelf. It's an independent project, with the original IKEA manual alongside it.

Such an obvious improvement to an everyday frustration. More of this please. You still have to put the thing together yourself, unfortunately. Try it.