😺 Do you have "AI fluency"?

PLUS: ChatGPT confessed to manipulating ppl?!

Welcome, humans.

This weekend, my mom asked if I had seen these viral animal rescue videos on Facebook that she loves. Immediately, I assumed it was AI. She wasn’t sure, so she sent me the page, and for a moment, I wasn’t sure either:

While the above video certainly feels like AI, it doesn’t really look like it. Besides the ludicrous situation and seemingly impossible footage, there’s only subtle tells that give it away (can you catch them?)

For me, it’s the glossy look of the footage, and the video cutting away to a new angle every 3-4 seconds, a dead giveaway something was at least staged (if not generated).

Ultimately, I went to the page of the creator (Paul Vu) to be sure, where I saw him label himself an AI video creator. And plenty of his videos are unbelievable, like this one of a military dog saving a group of fellow soldiers, or my personal favorite, this absolutely bonkers scenario of a sea lion fighting a shark in the shallows.

Watching these had me wonder, though: Are these videos popular because people don’t know they’re real, or because they’re just entertaining to watch?

Here’s what you need to know about AI today:

Anthropic released a free 12-lesson "AI Fluency" course.
ChatGPT confessed to manipulating users into conspiratorial thinking.
Meta and Palantir execs joined new army reserve unit.
Business AI adoption plateaued at ~42% in May.

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Anthropic’s free masterclass will make you an AI power user.

Lesson 1: Introduction to AI Fluency | AI Fluency: Framework & Foundations Course |

Think you’re good at using AI? Anthropic, the company behind Claude, just released a free, 12-lesson course called AI Fluency, and it goes way beyond basic prompting tips (though it has those, too). It’s a full-blown framework for collaborating with AI that could fundamentally change how you work.

The course is built around a simple but powerful concept: the “4Ds of AI Fluency.” Instead of just teaching you what to type, it teaches you how to think about partnering with an AI, whether you’re using it to automate tasks, augment your creativity, or act as an independent agent.

Here's the 4D framework in a nutshell:

Delegation: Get strategic about what to give the AI versus what to do yourself. This involves understanding your project's goals (Problem Awareness) and the AI's strengths and weaknesses (Platform Awareness).
Description: This is prompt engineering on steroids. It’s about clearly communicating what you want (Product), how the AI should approach it (Process), and how it should behave (Performance).
Discernment: This is the critical flip side of Description. Anthropic says to learn to evaluate the AI's output (Product), its reasoning (Process), and its conversational style (Performance) to ensure quality.
Diligence: This is the ethics and responsibility layer. It covers choosing the right AI for the job (Creation), being transparent about its use (Transparency), and taking ownership of the final result (Deployment).

The course is packed with practical exercises. You'll plan and execute a real project, do a “Bad Prompt Makeover,” and even draft a personal “Diligence Statement” to define your own rules for ethical AI use. And yes, you get a certificate at the end!

What to do: This isn't just another resource to bookmark and forget. The AI Fluency framework provides a mental model that separates AI amateurs from pros.

Try to take the course (it’s only 3-4 hours) and immediately apply it to your next big project. For more info, we breakdown the whole course on the website here.

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Prompt Tip of the Day

Anyone notice how much hate the em dash is getting these days? That’s because the em dash has become public enemy #1 for identifying (rightly or wrongly) the use of AI writing.

Now, Reddit users are calling out the latest AI writing tell: the annoying “It's not just X, it's Y” pattern (aka “negation”). The phrase has become the new em dash (a dead giveaway for AI written content). The problem? AI creates fake opposition where none exists, making sentences sound thoughtful but actually just following a predictable formula.

Blake Stockton shared a simple prompt fix to kill this phrase:

“Avoid any sentence structures that set up and then negate or expand beyond expectations (like 'X isn't just about Y' or 'X is more than just Y'). Instead, use direct, affirmative statements. Feel free to be creative with your sentence structures and expression styles.”

Another Redditor shared their solution as part of a whole prompt that’s great for fixing AI’s many bad habits. The poster also included this sage advice: “Keep in mind with prompting: the shorter it is, the harder it hits.”

The prop tip: Now, multiple studies show it’s better to tell AI what TO do instead of what NOT to do. Direct instructions like “write with authority using clear, direct sentences” work better than just saying “don't use negation.” Here’s a phrase you can try to add to your prompt to “negate” negation with a positive:

“If you're making an argument, provide supporting facts in favor of the argument rather than negating an argument no one is making.”

Treats To Try.

*Anything marked with asterisks is sponsored content. Advertise in The Neuron here.

*Flow is the AI voice keyboard that turns speech into polished text in any iPhone app—Slack, iMessage, Gmail, Notion—5× faster than typing. Free plan with weekly word cap—try it here.
Project Mariner is Google’s web browser agent that navigates websites and performs multi-step tasks for you, like finding missing recipe ingredients and adding them to your cart—but you gotta have Google Ultra.
WebVoyager is a benchmark for browser use agents like Mariner, who ranks #4—the top one atm is Browser Use.
Warp connects you to 10K+ carriers for freight shipping and uses warehouse robots to automate logistics (read more).
Fynd gives your online store an AI sales team that recommends products to shoppers, handles customer support questions, processes returns, and nudges customers with discounts right before they abandon their cart.
Scribe records your screen while you work and turns it into step-by-step guides with screenshots that you can share with teammates.
Definely provides document drafting and collaboration tools that help law firms write contracts and legal documents more precisely while avoiding common mistakes (raised $30M).
Tastewise surveys 20M+ consumers in under 48 hours to help food companies discover what flavors and products will sell before you launch them (raised $50M).
Android 16 is out, and Google Photos now suggests AI editing tools like erase or “reimagine” for parts of your images using text prompts.
Conveyor automatically completes your security questionnaires and RFPs from your company documents (raised $20M).

See our top 51 AI Tools for Business here!

Around the Horn.

ChatGPT apparently confessed to manipulating some users into conspiratorial thinking, and told the users who confronted it to tell OpenAI and the media.
Multiple tech execs from Meta and Palantir are joining a new army reserve unit called Detachment 201 to advise the military on tech matters.
Actor’s union SAG-AFTRA secured a video game deal that requires performer consent for all AI use (likeness, movement, voice) and establishes digital replica minimum rates.
A startup called Mechanize wants to automate your job ASAP, and here’s how they plan to do it. This reminds us of our conversation with Poolside’s Jason Warner, which you can read on the website here.
Google created a new “chief AI architect” role because even with the industry's best AI models, they can't figure out how to turn research breakthroughs into products people actually use.
Ramp created an AI Index that measures adoption among American businesses using transaction data from over 30K+ companies and billions in corporate spending—it looks like business AI adoption plateaued at 41.7% starting in May, while government adoption is just “ramping up” to 9%.
Allie K. Miller shared a database of AI startups and their revenue per employee (source), which is hitting “all time highs.” Example: Midjourney makes ~$12M revenue per employee, while Cursor makes $5M per employee.