Wearable AI is a promising mess you probably don't need yet
Scroll to the end for the full scoop this week: wearable AI tech, Adobe AI leaks, and the latest updates for creators on 𝕏.
Happy Monday evening! 🌙 If you’re in the US, I bid you a blissful farewell to tax season. Here was my tax strategy this year.
I’ve got a brief rundown of the latest news for creators and extremely online marketers below. Don’t forget to scroll to the end for some stray links, memes, and trends I bookmarked for you this week.
In this edition:
📌 MKBHD drops a bomb review on Humane's AI Pin
👀 Adobe explores partnership with OpenAI
📝 Instagram introduces profile Notes
💁🏼♀️ Taylor Swift's tracks return to TikTok
⛑️ TikTok enhances ad safety features
✅ 𝕏 offers verification incentives
👓 Grok gets vision capabilities
⛔️ 𝕏 ends option to hide blue checkmarks
stay saucey, friends 🍯
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AI & Creator Tools
📌 MKBHD reviewed Humane’s AI pin and it wasn’t good
Tech YouTuber Marques Brownlee, better known as MKBHD, had a lot to say about Humane's new AI Pin wearable device. In a video that’s now gone viral, he criticized the AI Pin's sluggish performance, wrong answers, short battery life, and poor photo and video quality.
MKBHD wasn’t the only one; TechRadar referred to the Humane product an “undercooked flop” while the Washington Post called it “a promising mess you don't need yet.”
A Humane employee said Brownlee's cutting review was “honest” and useful, committing to using the feedback for future improvements. But heated discourse around Brownlee's video also went viral on 𝕏, with one user slamming it as "almost unethical" for the creator to flex his influence on a growing startup:
An important point Brownlee made was around how exciting it is to get access to first-generation tech like the AI pin. And it is. It’s not going to be perfect. But that’s expected, and product reviews in our social-first age will reflect that.
For brands and businesses on the product side, this is a prime case study for the next time you have a niche product to launch. Don’t sleep on the creators itching to get their hands on these products. They wield a lot more power over brand influence than you might think.
👀 Adobe rumors
Adobe Premiere 🤝 Open AI? Adobe is exploring a partnership with OpenAI to integrate the company's generative AI tools (GPT, DALL-E, Sora) into Premiere Pro. Adobe was already planning to bring more AI features into its video tools — so this partnership makes sense. Adobe also wants users to tap into third-party AI tools like Runway and Pika Labs to generate and use within Premiere Pro, so expect some AI integrations on the horizon.
Did Firefly use MidJourney for training? Billed as being “brand safe” and trained on licensed images only, Adobe Firefly might not actually be commercially bulletproof. A new report reveals up to 5% of Firefly’s training data came from AI-generated sources like MidJourney. Naturally, it raises questions about how "clean" Firefly's (even though Adobe still claims Firefly is safe for commercial use and offers legal protections for its users).
Social News & Creator Trends
📝 Instagram brings Notes to profiles. Instagram just confirmed that profile Notes will be available for everyone, which means you’ll be able to share your thoughts or updates in text right on your profile — where it’ll stay up for 24 hours. It’ll look something like this:
I’m interested to see how this Notes-on-profiles feature performs for Instagram — because if anything, for creators, it’s another piece of digital real estate to spark conversations and draw attention to your brand.
💁🏼♀️ Tiktok can’t escape Taylor Swift. Some Swift tracks have returned to TikTok, despite an ongoing disputes with Universal Music Group (UMG). The most likely explanation: Taylor has a new album coming out and struck a private deal with TikTok. Afterall, the woman is an economy of her own (both on and offline) so it makes sense that TikTok would want to keep the relationship tight
⛑️ New ad safety features. TikTok has new brand safety controls and partnerships with ad verification partners DoubleVerify, Integral Ad Science, and Zefr. This means big-spending advertisers have more ways to verify campaign performance, helping brands avoid unwanted associations with potentially objectionable content on TikTok specifically (this is already standard practice with more established ad platform like Meta).
The 𝕏 rundown
The latest updates on the platform formerly known as Twitter.
✅ Verification incentives for brands. 𝕏 is offering $2,000-$10,000 in ad credits to those who pay for the "Basic Verified Organizations" or "Full Access" packages — a clear effort to boost subscription revenue.
👓 Grok is getting vision. The xAI model will soon be able to handle multimodal inputs like images and documents in addition to text.
⛔️ No more hiding blue checkmarks. 𝕏 is removing the option to hide blue verification checkmarks. It’s likely an attempt to make the badges more prominent and drive signups, especially as more users get free checkmarks based on engagement. Sorry, lurkers!
Sauce Snippets
Stray news, memes, and trends from the internet ✨
How to finetune an open source model with no coding experience
Trend alert: Why are you, as a man…?
Canva acquired Affinity to fill the Adobe-sized holes in its design suite
How brands are planning for festival season with Coachella and Stagecoach activations
Threads is testing new search filters