Good morning, AI enthusiasts. Thousands of people on X just confidently explained why an AI-generated image was inferior to a real Monet. Just one problem: It WAS a real Monet.

Conceptual artist SHL0MS’ latest experiment says less about AI art and more about the reflexive hostility baked into the tech, with critics lining up to trash an artwork the moment they thought a machine made it.

In today’s AI rundown:

• Artist shines mirror on AI anger with Monet post

• The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

• Build your cloud-based web crawler with Manus

• ChatGPT starts connecting to your money

• 4 new AI tools, community workflows, and more

LATEST DEVELOPMENTS

AI, ART & ANGER

🖼️ Artist shines mirror on AI anger with viral Monet post

Image source: Images 2.0 / The Rundown / @SHL0MS on X

The Rundown: Artist SHL0MS sparked a frenzy on X over a post that presented a real image of a painting from famed impressionist Claude Monet as AI-generated, sparking critiques of the work and shining a mirror on anti-AI bias seen in the creative world.

The details:

• SHL0MS posted that he generated the image in the style of Monet, asking users to describe why the "AI image" is inferior in as much detail as possible.

• The post received thousands of responses calling the image ‘emotionless’, ‘slop’, and critiquing specific features like depth, reflections, and composition.

• The image was an image of a real Monet, identified as from his Water Lilies collection from around 1915.

• The saga aligns with 2024 research, with Norwegian researchers finding people actually prefer AI art but show a clear negative bias against it.

Why it matters: This Monet-gate was one painting, but the reflex it exposed runs through the entire creative world right now. For a growing crowd, the word 'AI' alone triggers backlash regardless of context — and that knee-jerk hostility is only growing as the tech changes the world around us and embeds deeper into everyday life.

TOGETHER WITH UNWRAP

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The Rundown: Unwrap’s customer intelligence platform pulls all your feedback (surveys, reviews, support tickets, social comments, etc.) into one view, then uses AI + NLP to surface the most actionable insights straight to your inbox. Teams at Perplexity, Oura, Stripe, lululemon and DoorDash rely on Unwrap to ensure no customer voice gets lost.

With Unwrap, you get:

• All customer feedback automatically categorized

• Query feedback using Unwrap Assistant, or in your favorite tools using Unwrap's MCP

• Real-time alerts from feedback and a clear view of customer sentiment

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Unwrap is offering free trials to Rundown AI subscribers — grab 15 minutes with the team to get set up.

THE RUNDOWN ROUNDTABLE

💡 The Rundown Roundtable: Our AI use cases

Image source: Ideogram / The Rundown

The Rundown: The Rundown Roundtable is a weekly feature where we poll members of The Rundown staff about how we use AI in our work and daily lives.

Billy, University Educator: I made Claude Code my apprentice CAD designer because I don't know anything about engineering.

My wife needed a ring container to attach to her water bottle at the gym. I drew my idea for a threaded container and told Claude to prototype it. The first few prints were rough. But after the 8th prototype, we had the perfect design.

Rishi, Growth: YouTube is one of the best free education platforms out there, but the problem is that it takes a ton of time to sit through long videos just to find the few ideas that actually matter.

That’s where Gemini has been really useful for me. Since it’s built into Google, I can use it to quickly summarize a specific YouTube video, or even scan the last 5–10 videos from a creator to pull out the key takeaways.

Instead of spending hours watching everything, I can quickly understand the main ideas, find the best nuggets, and decide what’s worth digging into deeper. It’s basically a shortcut for learning from long-form content without consuming every minute of it.

AI TRAINING

☁️ Build your cloud-based web crawler with Manus

The Rundown: In this guide, you will learn how to turn Manus Cloud Computer into a private 24/7 web crawler for any site you want to monitor. Instead of having Manus burn tokens checking the same site each day, your cloud computer does it for cheap.

Step-by-step:

1. Open the Manus desktop app, go to Settings > My Computer, and click Create now under Cloud Computer to give Manus an always-on server

2. Start a new Manus task, select your Cloud Computer in the composer

3. Prompt: Set up a web crawler on my Cloud Computer for [URL]. First, inspect the site formatting and tell me the best way to check it reliably. Check for [info] twice a day. Log it to a CSV. Create a small script, schedule it with cron, log every run, and only save results that match [criteria]

4. Have Manus run the script once, then run it on 24/7. Once done, you can have Manus check the collected data anytime from your phone or laptop

Going further: Start with a Manus/Claude skill, or any AI workflow you use. Ask Manus which repetitive parts can run "for free" on your cloud computer, then save the agent.

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OPENAI

💸 ChatGPT starts connecting to your money

Image source: OpenAI

The Rundown: OpenAI released a new personal finance experience inside ChatGPT, partnering with Plaid to connect users’ financial institutions and give the chatbot real-time access to spending, investments, and bills for personalized financial insights.

The details:

• Users can connect via Plaid across Chase, Schwab, Robinhood, and 12,000+ institutions, with a dashboard tracking spending, portfolio, and upcoming bills.

• Intuit support is planned next for flows like tax estimates, credit-card approval odds, and connecting users to live experts.

• ChatGPT can analyze connected data, but cannot move money, pay bills, make trades, or file taxes (yet).

• The feature preview starts with U.S.-based Pro accounts, accessible via a new ‘finance’ sidebar or by tagging @finance directly in chats.

Why it matters: Financial guidance has been locked behind pricy advisors or clunky apps for a decade, and having a complete view of a user’s finances as context can unlock a seriously powerful experience. The biggest hurdle might be getting users to trust AI with that information, which is where Plaid comes in as the secure layer.

QUICK HITS

🛠️ Trending AI Tools

• 💸 ChatGPT for Personal Finance - Personal finance experience in ChatGPT

• 📱 Codex - OpenAI’s agentic platform, now available via mobile

• 💻 Higgsfield Supercomputer - Cloud AI agent with tools, memory, and more

• 🌌 Krea 2 - Krea's image AI with style transfer, moodboard-based generation

📰 Everything else in AI today

OAI’s Greg Brockman is reportedly moving to product strategy, with Thibault Sottiaux now leading core product and platform, and Nick Turley shifting to enterprise products.

Anthropic formed a $200M partnership with the Gates Foundation to deploy Claude in vaccine screening, disease forecasting, and K-12 tutoring in developing nations.

OpenAI reportedly acquired Weights.gg in January, a voice-cloning social network with celebrity replicas, with six staff members joining the company.

Pope Leo XIV established a Vatican AI advisory body and signed his first encyclical, which is expected to frame the technology as this generation's Industrial Revolution.

Poetiq released new research showing its self-building Meta-System can create and improve on its own harness, and achieve SOTA scores on a top coding benchmark.

A Gallup survey found that 70% of Americans oppose data centers being built nearby, with the infrastructure polling as less popular than local nuclear power plants.

COMMUNITY

🤝 Community AI workflows

Every newsletter, we showcase how a reader is using AI to work smarter, save time, or make life easier.

Today’s workflow comes from reader Anonymous:

"I'm learning to play guitar and kind of stuck at an advanced beginner level. I used Claude to create a practice journal to document each session - minutes practiced, chords learned, songs in progress, things to work on, that then creates a visual data dashboard of trends, song learning status, etc.

At the end of each updated dashboard, Claude gives me three to five new things to work on based on what I am practicing, similar songs to learn to take to the next level."

How do you use AI? Tell us here.

🎓 Highlights: News, Guides & Events

• Read our last AI newsletter: OpenAI takes Codex mobile

• Read our last Tech newsletter: Space pharma gets serious

• Read our last Robotics newsletter: Meet Unitree’s giant new mech

• Today’s AI tool guide: Build your own cloud-based web crawler with Manus

• RSVP to our next free live session on May 27: Become an AI-native leader

See you soon,

Rowan, Joey, Zach, Shubham, and Jennifer — the humans behind The Rundown