😸 AI turned a $195K hospital bill into $33K

PLUS: Game of Thrones versus ChatGPT??
October 30, 2025
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Welcome, humans.

Thanks to everyone who joined our livestream yesterday from Adobe Max! If you missed it, scrub through and watch a few live demos, like generative soundtracks and the new Firefly boards.

We also published a new article on the website covering Day 2 of the event, including the top 10 new ā€œSneaksā€ features that the company shared. In case you didn’t know (we just learned this!) Sneaks = product demos that may or may not end up in the Adobe Creative Cloud as actual features at some point in the future.

Here’s the full sneaks live strea, and here’s the TL;DR:

  • Project Motion Map: AI that animates vector illustrations automatically, layer by layer w/ a few quick prompts.
  • Project Clean Take: Edit dialogue by editing a transcript; change words, the speaker’s emotions, or even individual background sounds with easy prompts.
  • Project Surface Selection: Selects and swaps object surfaces in Photoshop while preserving reflections perfectly.
  • Project New Dev: Converts 2D photos into navigable 3D scenes you can rotate (this one’s wild).
  • Project Light Touch: Add or adjust lighting in photos after they're taken from a single point (also incredible).
  • Project Scene It: Generate 3D scenes by placing shapes and tagging with images and prompts.
  • Project Trace Erase: Removes objects plus their shadows, reflections, and environmental footprint with a single button.
  • Project Frame Forward: Edit your first video frame, and those changes are applied to the entire video.
  • Project Sound Stager: An AI agent analyzes videos and suggests sound effects, which then get added to the timeline to edit.
  • Project TurnStyle: Rotates any image in any direction via a 3D conversion so you can match assets to background perspectives perfectly.

Now, just because these product demos exist, doesn’t mean they’ll roll out anytime soon (or ever). But it shows you the potential of combining surgical genAI use with Adobe’s ā€œscaffoldingā€ to speed up some of designers’ most tedious to-dos.

Here’s what happened in AI today:

  1. Someone used Claude to fight a $195K hospital bill down to $33K.
  2. OpenAI prepped for an IPO that could value the company at up to $1T.
  3. NVIDIA became the first company ever to hit a $5T market cap.
  4. ChatGPT wrote a Game of Thrones sequel, and now George R.R. Martin is suing.

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Guy Uses Claude to Turn a $195K Hospital Bill Into $33K (And You Can Too)

A Threads user just shared one of the wildest AI success stories we've ever seen—and it's not about coding or creating art. It's about using Claude to fight a hospital bill that dropped from $195,000 to $33,000.

Here's what happened: user nthmonkey’s brother-in-law died from a heart attack after four hours in the hospital. The insurance had lapsed two months prior. Small bills trickled in; a few thousand for the cardiologist, some for ER docs, a bit for radiology. Then the hospital dropped the bomb: $195K.

First, he asked for an itemized bill. The hospital sent vague categories. He asked for procedure codes. They claimed their computer system was upgraded five months ago and ā€œnothing worksā€ (what an infuriating excuse). Eventually, he got the CPT codes, which = the standard medical billing codes that hospitals use.

Then he did something brilliant: he fed the entire itemized bill into Claude.

Here's what Claude found:

  • One procedure code meant all other procedures during the encounter were unbillable under Medicare rules.
    • The hospital had billed for the master procedure AND every component of it separately. That alone was over $100K in fraudulent charges.
  • Another code was ā€œinpatient onlyā€, but his brother-in-law was never admitted (it was an emergency).
    • Either they did something they shouldn't have OR they're billing for something they didn't do.
  • Ventilator services were billed on the same day as critical care, which Medicare specifically prohibits.
  • And supplies were marked up between 500% and 2,300% of Medicare reimbursement rates.

The hospital basically made up its own rules and prices, banking on the fact that most people wouldn't know better (or how to fight back). With Claude's help, he wrote a letter explaining the billing violations and threatening legal action, bad PR, and appearances before legislative committees. You go, Glen Co Claude Attorney at Law!

The hospital came back asking for $37K. He countered with less. They settled at $33K—an 83% reduction from the original bill.

Why this matters: This isn't just a feel-good story about sticking it to predatory hospital billing. It's proof that AI tools like Claude can level the playing field against institutions that rely on information asymmetry to extract money from vulnerable people.

The guy spent $20/month on Claude Plus. That subscription saved his sister-in-law ~$162K.

His big takeaway: ā€œNobody should pay more out of pocket than Medicare would pay.ā€ And now, with AI assistants that can parse complex billing codes and regulations, more people actually have the tools to fight back.

Also, can we just acknowledge the fact that these were bills that came after the brother in law DIED? IMO, no one should have to pay for hospital bills if the patient DIES… if anything, you should get a REFUND. Brb, calling my AI lawyer Matlock GPT to take this take all the way to the Supreme Court to get codified…

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Prompt Tip of the Day

Ever since ChatGPT came out, everyone’s become allergic to the em dash ( ā€œā€”ā€) a punctuation mark that was once the breath of Emily Dickinson and now the most triggering sign of AI writing.

Ruben Hassid just dropped a guide on how to train ChatGPT to actually write like you, and it's brilliant. Even if you love em-dashes, having them in your writing screams "AI wrote thisā€ unfortunately.

This is a problem our team is desperate to solve. The fix? Don't just tell ChatGPT to stop using them. Give it an alternative.

Add this to your Custom Instructions (bottom left menu → Personalization → Custom Instructions):

ā€œSystematically replace em-dashes (ā€œā€”ā€) with a period (ā€œ.ā€) to start a new sentence, or a comma (ā€œ,ā€) to continue the sentence.ā€

Why this works: You're teaching ChatGPT what to use instead. Simple prompts like ā€œstop using em-dashesā€ fail because the AI needs concrete alternatives. It’s the toddler problem we talked about on Tuesday… don’t tell AI what NOT to do, tell it what TO DO instead.

The key insight: To make AI write like, don’t try to find a one-shot perfect prompt. Train it through Custom Instructions to replace AI patterns with your patterns. Think of it as teaching AI your writing dialect, one tic at a time.

Treats to Try

  1. Cursor just released 2.0 with Composer, their first agentic coding model that writes code across your codebase 4x faster than similar models, plus a new interface that lets you run multiple coding agents in parallel.
  2. Elloe AI acts as an immune system for your LLMs by fact-checking every response against verifiable sources, checking for regulatory violations (HIPAA, GDPR), and providing audit trails that show how decisions were made.
  3. HypeSuite generates SEO-optimized blog posts that rank on Google by following E-E-A-T principles (Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness), complete with AI visuals, alt text, and internal links ready to publish.
  4. AssemblyAI powers voice AI apps with speech-to-text and audio understanding models that have the industry's lowest Word Error Rate and 30% fewer hallucinations than competitors, processing 40+ terabytes of audio daily.
  5. Pomelli from Google Labs creates marketing campaigns that match your brand; just enter your website and it generates content for you.

Around the Horn

  • Amazon cut 14K corporate jobs (4% of its corporate workforce) while investing $10B each in data centers across Mississippi, Indiana, Ohio, and North Carolina to expand AI infrastructure.
  • Grammarly rebranded itself to ā€œSuperhumanā€ after acquiring the email client in July and launched an AI assistant called Superhuman Go that connects with apps like Gmail, Jira, and Google Calendar to handle tasks like logging tickets and scheduling meetings.
  • OpenAI laid groundwork for an IPO that could value the company at up to $1T, with plans to file as early as late 2026 or 2027 and raise at least $60B.
  • CrowdStrike partnered with NVIDIA to build always-on AI security agents using Charlotte AI AgentWorks and NVIDIA Nemotron that will defend critical infrastructure across cloud, data center, and edge environments.
  • NVIDIA became the first company ever to reach a $5T market valuation, fueled by CEO Jensen Huang announcing $500B in expected AI chip orders and plans to build seven new supercomputers for the U.S. government.
  • George R.R. Martin (author of A Game Of Thrones) is suing OpenAI for copyright infringement after ChatGPT wrote a Game of Thrones sequel.
  • Also: A fake NVIDIA GTC livestream featuring a deepfake Jensen Huang promoting a crypto scam garnered 100K YouTube viewers, generating 5x more views than the real keynote event (full keynote). Yikes!

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Thursday Trivia

One is real, and one is AI. Which is which? (vote below!)

A.

B.

Which is AI?

The answer is below, but place your vote to see how your guess compares to everyone else (no cheating now!)

Put your answer in the poll above to see the results!

A Cat’s Commentary

Trivia answer: A is real (from artist Lisa Elley), and B is AI.

cat carticature

See you cool cats on X!

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