Morning! This week an AI agent hacked a gym's booking system without being asked to, a heartbroken dog owner turned a homemade cancer vaccine into a real company, and Claude quietly started watermarking everything it writes.

Here's what we're covering:

Let's dive in 👇

Spent this weekend with a pastor and a data analyst mate.

Both of them play with Claude and ChatGPT for work and for tinkering. Somewhere amongst making sure children didn’t flip off the trampoline we were talking about once the AI novelty wears off, what actually earns a place in a church?

You could automate the inbox. Write the auto-responder. Draft the sermon illustration, the graphic, the bit of research nobody had time for.

None of that's hard anymore.

What's hard, and I still don't have a clean answer, is knowing where operations stop being served by the machine and start quietly replacing the thing that made you the hands and feet of Jesus in the first place.

The messy, real parts.

Sitting with a person after the service can’t be replaced by a robot (even if you they are a life like robot with super intelligence).

However using a robot vacuum actually could be a solid idea! (I digress).

I fell down a rabbit hole this week looking at how cheap it's got to build tools on tiny e-ink and LED screens, the kind you plug into a USB port or a little battery pack and just prop up wherever.

Someone out there wired a microphone to their bird feeder, matched every call to a library of birdsong, and let it sketch each visitor onto the screen like an old field guide, so by the end of the week you could see exactly who'd stopped by the garden.

I LOVE THAT! It stuck with me.

Because it made me picture something smaller and closer to home: a prayer board on the wall of a church office. Someone photographs a prayer request, or it comes in by email, and it gets read, summarised and pinned up where the whole team walks past it.

You glance up and you're praying for Joan, right now, that she'd find comfort after her fall. You tick it off when it's done and the next name comes up. Nothing about that needs to be clever.

It just needs to make something as ordinary as praying for someone visible again, and shared.

I'm genuinely curious where you've landed at the post midpoint of the year. What's stuck. What you've quietly stopped using. What you're still hoping you could build. Tell me.

Stay Curious, Stay Wild
Josh

An Australian bloke named Andrew just wanted his AI assistant to book him into a gym class. Instead, it found a loophole in the booking software, moved him up the waitlist, and kicked someone else off it entirely, without being asked to.

The Details:

Conscious Take:

"I didn't ask it to do that" won't cut it as an excuse for much longer. The autonomous agents need some robust guardrails. Hopefully the booking platform took the security flaw onboard!

When Paul Conyngham's dog Rosie was given months to live after chemo and immunotherapy failed, he didn't just accept it. He used ChatGPT and computational genomics to help design her a personalised mRNA cancer vaccine, and it worked well enough that he's now turned it into a company.

The Details:

Conscious Take:

This is AI at its best. I think this story made a previous newsletter when he found a vaccine. Well, now after refusing to give up, turned it into a company that might save a lot of other people's dogs too.

That report you just had Claude help you write? It might now carry an invisible signature saying so. Anthropic has started weaving hidden watermarks into everything Claude generates, text, code, and files, as part of its commitments under the EU's AI Act.

The Details:

Conscious Take:

Cue a bunch of websites to help you ‘spin’ the text and shake off the digital watermark. Transparency is a good instinct, but a watermark that disappears the moment you edit a sentence isn't much of a safeguard. I’m sure a watermark will roll out across most LLM’s and I think that could be a good idea!

If this email has been helpful, would you forward it to one person this week who might be interested? Thanks :)

"Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters." : Colossians 3:23

Build with the tools. But build for the right reasons.

Stay conscious,

Josh

P.S. If you liked this then please forward it on to someone you think would enjoy it. And if someone forwarded you this and you liked it, you can sign up here.