Which AI tool should you actually use?

Happy Wednesday,

Today I'm getting into an AI scam that genuinely rattled me when I read about it, and the four minute fix that almost nobody has bothered to do. Then I'm breaking down the new best AI video model on the planet and being honest about the part of it that worries me. And I'm finishing with my updated tier list of every AI tool worth paying for right now.

Let's get into it.

🚨 THIS IS SERIOUS

This AI Scam Is Getting Genuinely Scary

So a woman got a call last year from her daughter. She was crying, saying she'd been taken and that they wanted money. And she was completely convinced, because it was literally her daughter's voice on the other end of the phone. She paid five thousand dollars before finding out her daughter had been sitting at work the entire time.

It was a clone. The exact voice she'd heard every single day for twenty years, and here's the part that should bother you. Cloning a voice takes a few seconds of audio. That's it. A voicemail you left. A video you posted. A story you put up at a wedding. Anything with you talking in it is enough.

That came out at a US Senate hearing on AI scams last week, and the report alongside it counted 893 million dollars lost to AI-powered scams in a single year across more than 22,000 complaints. It also found over 82% of phishing emails are now written by AI, which explains why they suddenly stopped having the terrible spelling that used to give them away. And if you're reading this outside the US, don't tune out. The hearing was American. The scam very much isn't.

I'm not telling you this to scare you. I'm telling you because the fix takes about four minutes and almost nobody has bothered to do it.

Step 1: Pick a safe word with your family tonight. Something nobody could guess and nothing you've ever posted anywhere. If anyone ever calls in a panic asking for money, you ask for the word. No word, no money. Tell whoever in your family would actually wire money if they thought you were in trouble, because that's the person these people are calling.

Step 2: Hang up and call back on the number you already have saved. Not the number that just called you. A cloned voice cannot survive you ringing the real person, and it takes ten seconds.

Step 3: When a message looks off, stop squinting at it and just paste it in. This is the one I'd save somewhere:

Step 4: And this one is genuinely uncomfortable, which is exactly why it's worth running once. It shows you what somebody would actually have to work with if they came after you:

The answer is going to be more than you expect, and that's the whole point of running it. Most of what it finds takes about ten minutes to clean up once you can actually see it listed out.

Send this one to someone in your family. The people getting hit hardest are the ones who still think a familiar voice on the phone proves anything. It stopped proving anything about two years ago and most people haven't caught up yet.

Get my full scam-proofing guide →

🎬 THIS IS INSANE

The New Best Video Model on the Planet

A Chinese company called ByteDance, the same people who own TikTok, just dropped the best AI video model on the planet. Some of you might remember me going on about Seedance 2.0 a while back, which was already the best one out there and is what I've been running most of my own creative work through. Well, on Friday they put out 2.5.

Let me explain what actually changed, because the headlines are useless. Up until now every AI video model topped out at about 15 seconds. That doesn't sound like a big deal until you realise it means every AI video you've ever seen was really a pile of short clips glued together, and if you looked closely the person's face shifted slightly every time the shot changed. That's the tell and how you knew.

This one does 30 seconds in one go, with the sound created at the same time as the picture instead of added afterwards. Same face, same room, same voice, start to finish. You can also hand it up to 30 photos so it knows exactly what your person or your product is supposed to look like.

And honestly, we're at the point where this is getting a little absurd. It is essentially impossible to look at one of these videos, like the one above, and guess whether it's AI or not. I do this every single day and I still get fooled.

One honest note before you go looking for it. It launched in China first, so you can't properly get at it in the US yet and Higgsfield has a waitlist for it. What you can use today is Seedance 2.0, which still sits third in the world when people rank clips blind without knowing which model made them, ahead of Google's Veo. It's brilliant, and you'll already know your way around it by the time 2.5 opens up.

I'm pro AI, you know that. But the thing worth sitting with here is that video has quietly stopped being proof of anything. Photos went years ago. Video was the last thing most of us still believed without thinking about it, and that just ended.

Try Seedance inside Higgsfield →

💡 HONEST TAKE

My Honest AI Tier List for 2026

I get asked every single day which AI tools are actually worth paying for and which ones are a waste of money. I redo this every couple of months because it moves fast, and a fair bit has shifted since the last one.

A few of my favorites recently. WisprFlow jumped to the top for me. It's a tool I've been testing for the last few months and it has genuinely made a huge difference. It's voice dictation, you just talk and it turns it into clean text. I'm going to make the call now: in a few years everyone is going to be using this. It changed the way I do everything and it's made me about ten times faster.

ChatGPT Work has made a huge comeback and it's making a real difference in what I'm able to get done. I'm honestly preferring it over Claude Cowork right now, specifically on token usage. I can hand it a big messy job and it just gets on with it without me watching a usage bar the whole time.

And as always, Cytd AI and Poppy AI help me with pretty much every part of growing my content and actually getting more eyeballs on the brand. Then at the bottom there's Meta AI, and I genuinely don't know a single person who's happy with it. It's sitting inside apps you open every single day and I have never once chosen it over anything else.

Get my full AI stack for 2026 →

Please go pick a safe word with your family tonight. It's one text message and it's easily the most useful thing in this email. And if you take one thing off the tier list, download WisprFlow and talk to your AI instead of typing at it. I promise you won't go back.

See you Sunday.

Maverick

P.S. Want your business to actually show up inside AI? The brands that rank are seeing up to 3x the conversions. Get your free AI visibility score and see exactly where you stand inside AI.

P.P.S. If you're new here or you ever skip one, I've got a newsletter archive of all my past emails you can catch up on anytime.