AI Tidbits – Automation Everywhere, Quality Optional: AI Enters Its Messy Phase

AI Tidbits – Automation Everywhere, Quality Optional: AI Enters Its Messy Phase

2026 is shaping up to be the year AI fully escapes the hands of experts and floods the mainstream — not just as a tool, but as an invisible force shaping what we watch, buy, believe, and create. The upside is obvious: faster workflows, stunning visuals, and superhuman productivity. The downside is emerging just as quickly: low-quality content at massive scale, blurred lines between human and machine output, and a growing need for taste, judgment, and restraint. This week’s AI Tidbits sits right at that crossroads — where efficiency collides with discernment.

 

🎥 The Rise of “AI Slop”: When Algorithms Chase Attention, Not Quality

A new report from video-editing platform Kapwing reveals an uncomfortable truth about today’s content economy: AI slop is everywhere.

After creating a fresh YouTube account and analyzing the first 500 recommended videos, researchers found that 21% were low-quality, auto-generated AI videos—designed purely to farm views, not inform or entertain. These weren’t obscure uploads either. Many came from top-performing channels pulling billions of views and millions in ad revenue.

Kapwing defines AI slop as mass-produced, low-effort content created to exploit recommendation systems—very different from thoughtful, AI-assisted storytelling.
Efficient? Absolutely. Healthy for the internet? That’s debatable.

 

🤖 Scary… or Simply the Future of Work?

Anthropic’s Claude Code creator, Boris Cherny, dropped a line that made a lot of developers pause:

“100% of contributions to Claude Code last month were written by Claude Code itself.”

Let that sink in.

Around the same time, Andrej Karpathy (OpenAI founding member) admitted he has “never felt this much behind as a programmer,” adding that the profession itself is being dramatically refactored.

This isn’t automation replacing people overnight.
It’s roles quietly reshaping—faster than most are comfortable admitting.

💼 LinkedIn Portraits: Three AI Visual Plays That Actually Work

If you’re tired of stock photos and glossy AI faces that scream “generated,” these approaches deliver credible, high-value visuals you can use today.

 

📸 1. The “Style Transfer” Portrait

Stop describing vibes. Show them.

This meta-prompt lets you borrow lighting, composition, and mood from any image you like—and apply it to your own face.

How to do it:

• Upload a clear selfie (The Subject)
• Upload a second image with the vibe you want (The Style Reference)
• Use this exact prompt:

“Act as an expert photographer. Create a highly detailed image that captures the exact lighting, camera lens, composition, and aesthetic of Image 2, but features the Subject from Image 1.”

 

🧑‍💼2. The “Realistic” LinkedIn Portrait

Sometimes you just need a clean, professional image that doesn’t look like AI art.

Steps:

• Upload your selfie
• Use this prompt:

“Act as a cinematic portrait photographer. Create a photorealistic image to place me in the following setting: [INSERT SETTING HERE, e.g., ‘A sunlit home office’ or ‘A busy New York coffee shop’]. The image must: A 35mm or 85mm portrait lens. Natural, high-contrast lighting (Golden Hour or Window Light). Realistic skin texture (pores, slight imperfections) to avoid the ‘AI smooth’ look. Professional styling appropriate for the setting.”

 

🧠3. The “Instant” Infographic

Nano Banana isn’t just for faces—it’s excellent for thinking visually.

Turn dense text into a polished visual in minutes.

Steps:

• Enable Thinking in your model settings
• Paste your entire document
• Use this prompt:

“Take the following and transform in the image of a professor whiteboard image: diagrams, arrows, boxes, and captions explaining the core idea visually. Use colors as well: [Insert Text].”

LinkedIn-ready tip:
Add this line at the end: “1080 x 1350 pixel dimensions.”

 

🧪Alibaba’s Quiet Power Move in AI Images

Alibaba’s Qwen team has released Qwen-Image-2512, an open-source image model focused on enterprise-grade realism.

It specifically targets:

1. Natural human rendering without the “AI look”
2. Accurate text embedding for slides and infographics
3. Finer, more believable textures

Early benchmarks rank it as the strongest open-source image model to date, rivaling even Gemini 3 Pro.

🔗 Read more: https://qwen.ai/blog?id=qwen-image-2512

 

Find the Best Shopping Deals with ChatGPT

Shopping research inside ChatGPT is quietly becoming a serious alternative to traditional search.

How to use it:

1. Sign in to ChatGPT
2. Click + → Shopping Research → Enable
3. Describe what you want

 

Sample prompt:

“I want to buy a mobile phone under $1,500 for work and light video editing. Prioritize performance, battery life, memory and video editing tools. Compare the best current deals across major retailers, explain the trade-offs between options, and recommend the best overall pick with 1–2 strong alternatives.”

Answer a few follow-ups, review the trade-offs, and buy.
Search, as we knew it, is changing—fast.

 

😂A Funny Perspective

To end on a lighter note, today’s meme says more about AI than a thousand think-pieces ever could. Perfect on the surface… and then you look under the hood. 😄

That’s today’s AI Tidbits.
AI is no longer the hard part.
Knowing what to create, what to ignore, and what to trust is.

Same curiosity. Same pace of change.
See you next Tuesday.