Free courses / Making Things With AI / Lesson 4
Why the giveaways expire
Count the fingers was true, got fixed, and now gets people caught.
Every list of giveaways published in the last few years has aged badly. Count the fingers. Watch for blinking. Look at the teeth. Check the spelling. Each was genuinely true, each got fixed, and each is still being passed around.
That is the specific harm, and it is worse than the advice simply going out of date. It does not leave somebody neutral. It leaves them confident. They check for the thing they learned, do not find it, and conclude the thing is genuine.
So the question to ask is not whether it looks real. It is where it came from. Something genuinely newsworthy exists in more than one place, from more than one source. Something that exists only in the message you were sent has already told you most of what you need.
- Every visual tell has an expiry date nobody announces.
- A failed checklist leaves you confident, not careful.
- Ask where else it exists before you look at it closely.
ORBIT / THE NAVIGATOR
I have watched a generated seagull walk behind a bin and come out as a different seagull. Nobody in the comments noticed, including me, for a while.
Try it
Find something forwarded to you that you were not sure about. Do not study the picture. Search the claim as a sentence instead, and see whether anybody else is reporting it.
I have been sent a video making a surprising claim about a well-known person. Ask me the questions you would need answered to work out whether it is worth believing, without either of us looking at the video itself.
Then paste it into whichever assistant you use — ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini or Copilot. Not sure which? Meet them all.
Progress is saved on this device.
Questions about “Why the giveaways expire”Asked by readers, answered by us. Open to read them.
Open to load them.
Ask about this page and we will answer it here, where the next person can read it too.
Nobody else can answer you, and you cannot answer anybody else. This is not a forum — we would rather say that than run a room we cannot watch at three in the morning.
Your question goes up with the answer and without your name. Nothing identifies you, ever.
If we cannot answer it we will tell you why, and that one stays between us.