Welcome, humans.

In celebration of The Neuron hitting a whopping 250,000 subscribers (yup!), we're giving one lucky reader $250 for an AI tool subscription of their choice (ChatGPT+, Grok, you name it).

Here's how to enter: Just refer a friend to The Neuron using your unique referral link below. Each referral counts as one entry, so 1 referral = 1 entry, 5 referrals = 5 entries, & so on.

Drop your link in a group chat, Slack channel, or blast it on LinkedIn. Hurry, entries close on Monday!

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

• AI influencers are becoming a more attractive option for brands.

• Apple is on a hiring/acquiring spree to compete in AI.

• 88% of top news outlets have blocked AI scrapers like GPTBot.

• ElevenLabs released a new Dubbing Studio.

AI influencers are becoming a real marketing strategy for brands. 

See these three women?

They’re social media influencers that boast millions of combined followers and charge some brands 6-figure fees for brand promotions.

They’re also not real people…

As AI-generated images become increasingly lifelike (cheers, Midjourney), more brands are choosing AI-generated "influencers" over flesh-and-blood humans.

The primary driver? You guessed it: money. 

Take H&M, for instance: they slashed costs by 91% per person using "virtual creator content" in their marketing mix.

And here’s what the creator of one AI influencer had to say:

Why it matters: Now you might be thinking: “Noah, Pete, isn’t this hyper-sexualization of non-existent women driving consumerism a bad thing?”

Probably.

Yet, as many Redditors note, plenty of human influencers promote equally superficial and unrealistic lifestyles, so, in a way, AI influencers are just a new twist on an old theme.

In the end, brace yourselves for more AI influencers on your “For You” page, cause, as Jeff Bezos famously says, “Your margin is my opportunity.” 

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Treat(s) To Try.

Today, we’re sharing a few gems, cause we’re still in that holiday-giving type of mood.

1) AI assistants for Excel and Google Sheets are just around the corner ($MSFT is rolling out theirs now), but in the meantime, use Numerous.ai.

It’s the easiest way to prompt ChatGPT within your spreadsheets for tasks like rephrasing text and creating formulas.

2) Next up, InterviewerAI - it's exactly as it sounds. A fully simulated AI interviewer that helps you hone your skills for technical presentations. The demo made us gasp.

3) Remember ElevenLabs, the fresh AI unicorn we covered two days ago? They launched a new Dubbing Studio that gives you complete control over translating videos across 29 languages (like making the tone just right).

We curated the top 27 tools you need for work in our “Top Tools For Business”!

Around the Horn.

• Apple is on a hiring, acquiring, and firing spree to embed AI in iPhones, stat.

• 88% of top media outlets have blocked AI bots from scraping their data.

• The National Science Foundation announced a program to boost AI computing access to researchers/schools.

• Our friend Ben Parr published a 110+ slide presentation on the state of AI investing.

Thursday Trivia.

A few weeks back someone quizzed us, “What's with all the cats?” Our reply: “Cause we’re weird like that!” She just shrugged and walked away, LOL.

One glance, everyone knows the rules: one of these is AI and one is real.

Which is which?

A Cat's Commentary.

Trivia answer: The left is real and the right is AI.