Half of America uses AI. Most don't trust it.

Good morning.
I asked Claude something I was pretty sure about last week, just to see what it would say. It agreed with me. That should have felt reassuring. Instead, it made me wonder if that's a feature or a flaw. Pew Research released new numbers this week that might explain the feeling. More than half of America is using AI. Most of them don't quite trust it. Useful but untrusted might be the most accurate description of where we actually are right now.

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FEATURED POST
The ChatGPT Feature I've Been Waiting For

My wife Andi has had a standing health check-in ritual every Friday morning for months. She opens a chat, types out how she slept, what she ate, anything that felt off. It works. She just has to remember to start it, which means it doesn't always happen.

Tuesday's tutorial covers the ChatGPT feature that changes that. It's called scheduled tasks, and it lets you set something up once and have it run on whatever schedule you choose. Friday morning. Every Thursday evening. Daily at 8 AM. No manual prompting. No remembering.

I walk through which plan actually includes this feature, how to set it up in a few straightforward steps, and the five tasks worth automating first. If you've ever wished AI would just handle something without being asked, this is the one to read before Friday.

Read the full post here 👉 The ChatGPT Feature I've Been Waiting For

HELPFUL EVERYDAY PROMPTS
DO Try This at Home
Just copy-and-paste into your favorite AI tool. Remember to edit any brackets, then follow up with clarifying questions until you get a response that works for you.

Great American Campout (June 27)
🏕️ Plan Your Perfect Campout. "Act as an experienced outdoor camping guide. I'm planning a camping trip at [location or campground name] with [describe your group: number of people, ages, and experience level]. Create a three-day packing checklist, a simple meal plan I can prep at home before we leave, and three campfire-friendly activities. Flag any safety items I should prioritize."

Social Media Day (June 30)
📱 Lock Down Your Privacy Today. "Act as a social media privacy consultant for everyday users. I use [list your platforms: Facebook, Instagram, etc.]. Walk me through the three most important privacy settings I should change right now, tell me what I should stop sharing publicly, and give me one habit that will make my time online safer going forward."

Canada Day (July 1)
🍁 Plan a Real Canadian Adventure. "Act as a Canadian travel expert who knows what tourists miss. I love [describe your interests: food, nature, history, small towns]. Recommend the best region of Canada for me, suggest a seven-day itinerary with at least two off-the-beaten-path experiences, and tell me the one thing I absolutely cannot leave without doing."

International Chicken Wing Day (July 1)
🍗 Make the Best Wings You've Ever Tasted. "Act as a professional chef who specializes in bar-style cooking at home. I want to make chicken wings that beat anything I'd order out. Give me one classic Buffalo recipe and one creative sauce alternative, plus your best tips for getting them genuinely crispy without a deep fryer."

National Financial Freedom Day (July 1)
💰 Map Your Path to Financial Independence. "Act as a certified financial planner helping adults over 50 close the gap toward financial freedom. Here's my current situation: [describe your monthly income, major expenses, any debts, and current savings]. Identify my two biggest financial leaks and give me three specific steps I can take in the next 30 days to move in the right direction."

National Wildland Firefighter Day (July 2)
🔥 Check Your Home's Wildfire Risk. "Act as a home fire safety consultant who specializes in wildfire preparedness for homeowners. I live in [your city or region]. Evaluate my risk level, tell me the three most important changes I can make to protect my property, and give me a simple defensible space checklist I can complete over a weekend."

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REAL WORLD
How We Used AI This Week
Real people, real uses—here’s how AI is quietly making life better, one small win at a time.

🧵 Sheila was helping her sister scale down a quilt pattern to fit a smaller starting square, a project that typically means hours of recalculating fabric measurements by hand. She fed the original pattern into AI and asked it to convert everything proportionally. It did, flagged a few cuts that would produce awkward decimal measurements, and offered a quilter-friendly version using easier fractions. A project that could have stalled for two days was sorted in minutes.

🎵 Schy W., from The Rundown newsletter, fed a multi-day music festival's full schedule PDF into Claude and gave it a list of bands he wanted to see, with a short list of absolute priorities. In a single exchange, it built a complete viewing plan covering stages, set times, partial overlaps, and tradeoffs, with the decision-making laid out so he could see exactly how it weighted his choices. Four days of scheduling optimized in one prompt.

👉How do you use AI at home? Tell us here.

AI INSIGHT
More Americans Use AI Now. Fewer of Them Trust It.

Pew Research's 2026 survey of more than 5,000 U.S. adults confirmed what a lot of us probably suspected: chatbot use has nearly doubled since 2024, and trust has moved in the opposite direction.

More than half of Americans have now used an AI chatbot. Most of them expect AI to make society worse, not better. Both things are true at the same time.

ChatGPT leads the pack at 44% of users. Gemini sits at 24%. Claude, which powers most of what goes into producing this newsletter, came in at 6%. Make of that what you will.

Here's what the data doesn't capture: useful and trusted are two different things. You can find AI genuinely helpful for scaling a quilt pattern or optimizing a music festival schedule, and still be appropriately skeptical about the companies building these tools. That's not a contradiction. It's probably the right posture for most people right now.

The readers who get the most out of AI aren't the ones who trust it most. They're the ones who stay most deliberate about when and how they use it.

READER POLL

NEWS YOU CAN USE
This Matters at Home
Short, practical summaries to help you stay updated on recent AI news—and what it means for everyday life.

🧒 AI Is Flooding Your Grandkids' YouTube With Junk Dressed Up as Learning. AI-generated "educational" videos are packing YouTube Kids with garbled letters, misspelled states, and dangerous content. One teaches toddlers that green means "right." The algorithm serves them automatically, and most parents and grandparents have no idea it's happening.

🏥 Free ChatGPT Just Got Better at Health Answers. OpenAI upgraded its free default model to deliver health responses now comparable to its most advanced tools. Over 230 million people ask ChatGPT health questions every week. The rate of incorrect health responses dropped 71% in two months. Available to all free users at no cost.

🧬 A Shelved Lab Mystery. Three Years. GPT-5 Solved It in One Session. Immunologist Derya Unutmaz fed a stalled T-cell experiment to GPT-5 Pro and got the answer his whole lab had missed for three years. The model then predicted the outcome of an unpublished study. That's not a search engine anymore.

💼 Big Tech Is Paying to Clean Up the Mess It's Making. OpenAI, Anthropic, Amazon, and Microsoft are backing RAISE US, a $500M nonprofit to help American workers survive the job disruption their own AI is causing. Points for self-awareness, at least.

🩻 The AI That Made Pretty Pictures Is Now Scanning Your Body. Midjourney unveiled a full-body ultrasound scanner: no radiation, no MRI tube, 60 seconds floating in a warm pool of water. Its first health spa opens in San Francisco in 2027. Yes, the AI image company.

🚗 A Car Dealer's AI Chatbot Offered Too Much for a Trade-In. The Dealer Had to Pay Up. A Toronto BMW dealer's AI chatbot promised $7,000 more than a trade-in was worth, then tried to walk it back. After CBC News covered the story, the dealer honored the deal. The customer had no idea he was talking to a bot.

🎧 Apple's Next AirPods Will Have Eyes. Tiny cameras in the stems will give Siri a live view of what you're looking at, so you can ask about ingredients, identify plants, or get directions hands-free. Planned launch: late 2027.

TOOLS FOR YOU
🛡️ Tool Spotlight: Incogni

Every time you sign up for something online, your personal information gets collected and sold to data brokers, companies that will sell your name, address, and phone number to anyone who pays. Incogni finds your information on those sites and forces them to remove it, automatically, on an ongoing basis, across hundreds of brokers at once. You set it up once and it runs without you. If you've ever searched for yourself online and been surprised by what you found, this is how you fix that. Start here.