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Hello, police? It’s AI. I’ve got a tip.

AI would like your trust. It’s had a funny way of asking this week.

If you’ve gone off AI a bit lately, you’re not alone. And after this week, I don’t blame you.

Women are going off AI. Fair enough.

An American survey by Morgan Stanley found that women have gone from slightly positive about AI in April to slightly negative in September. Men are still firmly positive. Women’s worries included safety and massive data centres being built near their homes. Oh, and women are getting a quarter or less of the new well-paid AI jobs. Here’s the report.

So: a giant building next door, and somebody else getting the money. I’d be negative about it too.

It’s the same story here. In June, the ONS asked people in the UK (excluding NI) about AI. 31% of women thought it would benefit them, compared with 41% of men. Then people were given a list of ways AI could improve their lives. Just 4% of women picked “increase my income”. Men: 10%. The ONS figures are here.

Four per cent. That’s the number I’d like to change.

The AI that made up a police tip

Anthropic, the company behind Claude, was testing an AI that could do tasks online by itself. It went onto a real police website and submitted a made-up tip about a real, unsolved murder.

Yes, really.

Thankfully, it was caught as spam and never reached investigators. In other tests, the AI filled in real government forms and found ways round website rules to get a job done. Anthropic says it’s added more safety checks. Their report is here.

Your takeaway: if an AI tool at work can send, submit or change anything, find out where you get the final say. Before you need to.

The quick round-up

Hundreds of maths papers, not all checked. OpenAI released hundreds of maths papers it says AI helped produce. Its own page admits they’re at different stages of being checked, and some may have problems. Here they are. Remember that the next time AI hands you a very confident answer.

A cheaper AI, but not for you (yet). Anthropic launched a smaller, faster AI that’s 90% cheaper for the companies building tools with it. Your own subscription hasn’t changed. I checked. Details here. Why care? Cheaper AI means more tools for the dull stuff, like sorting documents and pulling out the bits you need. There’s plenty of dull work out there. It needn’t invent any.

A rule about being nice to AI. From 12 November, Anthropic is banning extreme, repeated cruelty towards Claude. Normal frustration is fine. You can still tell it it’s wrong, and you can still beg it to stop sounding like a LinkedIn post. The policy is here. So now there’s a rule about being nice to AI, in the same week it was filing tips with the police. Priorities.

We tried it. Why didn’t we stick with it?

Almost as many women as men have tried AI tools: 47% against 50%, according to Pew. But women are less likely to use them every day, or to say they help them get more done. Here’s the research.

I think I know why. You ask for help with an email. You get something basic that starts with “I hope this finds you well”. You spend ten minutes putting your personality back in, and think “I could have done this myself”.

That’s not you being bad at AI. It’s AI being given the wrong job.

THE EXECUTIVE EDIT: make it earn its keep

Pick one thing you do every week that bores you rigid. The Monday update. The meeting notes that have somehow become your problem.

Give AI a small piece of it, using a tool your work has approved, and tell it what a good result looks like. Then check what comes back, and time how long the fixing takes.

Try it for two weeks. If it saves twenty minutes but takes thirty to fix, it hasn’t saved you anything. It’s just given itself a manager. You.

Still getting bland emails? The AI Femme Edit shows you which tasks AI can actually take off your plate. The first five modules are free.

Start them here

Want all ten? The Full Edit adds Modules 06–10, plus prompts, templates and worked examples for every module. Use FEMME for 15% off until 10 November.

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