Hey so I wanted to come on here and introduce myself. I'm Barrie from a YouTube channel known as Music Tech Info. I've been reporting on AI Music for 2.5 years now and last year created my AI Artist - JJ Felix. It's great to join this community. You can check out JJ on www.JJFelix.com and my channel at https://www.youtube.com/@musictechinfo

Hey hey hey, everyone! Whoa what an end to the year it was. I was totally locked down in real world activities the entire month of December that I was barely even online! But here we are, new year, new opportunies. Let's make it an AI year to remember! What's cooking for you so far this year in AI? With moi, there's a totally new potential opportunity that I am totally excited about. More on that later.

(Originally shared in another community—posting here for those not plugged into that thread, because this one’s too juicy to miss! LOL) So apparently Brett Johnson—the guy who used to make millions stealing identities before he found Jesus (or at least LinkedIn)—is warning us about the next wave of cyber threats. Spoiler alert: it’s not some Hollywood hacker in a hoodie; it’s AI doing the dirty work at industrial scale. ________________________________________ Here’s the boil down of his three horsemen of the Fraudpocalypse: • Deepfakes 🎙️ → Forget Nigerian princes. Now it’s your “CEO” calling with a perfect voice clone asking you to wire money. • Scam farms 🏭 → Organized fraud sweatshops, now turbocharged by AI. Think call centers, but instead of selling you extended car warranties, they’re running mass scale scams with scripts written by ChatGPT’s evil twin. • Synthetic IDs 🪪 → Frankenstein identities stitched together from real and fake data. They slip past banks and credit checks like butter. And Johnson’s “solutions”? The usual corporate kumbaya: • Use multi factor authentication (because hackers love when you add one more step before they steal your stuff). • Freeze your credit (translation: lock the barn after the horse has already been deepfaked). • Don’t overshare online (LOL, good luck telling that to TikTok zombies). • Verify before you trust (which is basically “don’t be dumb,” but dressed up as advice). ________________________________________ 🎯 My Take Cybercrime isn’t just evolving—it’s scaling like a startup 🚀. AI is the new intern, except it doesn’t complain about unpaid overtime while it’s busy writing scam scripts and generating fake passports.

Happy Sunday, Creators! I actually had fun putting the scenes together for this short vid for Desert Winter Wonderland. I want a snowbuggy like that for when I have to go up the mountain! LOL Tools used: Suno for music, New Hero for album cover design, Grok for image 2 vid, Canva to put it all together.

A reflection, not an excerpt. Looking back at the “Year of the Agents” — the agentic promises, the existential meltdowns, and the few genuine breakthroughs — here’s where I landed. I’ve really appreciated how grounded and creative the conversations in this group have been this year. Meanwhile, the broader AI world has been doing its usual mix of hype cycles, pivots, breakthroughs, and the occasional existential meltdown. Somewhere in all that noise, my own thinking around AI finally settled into something that feels… sensible. Not mystical, not doom y, not “agentic destiny,” and definitely not an excerpt from a book I’m never going to write. Just a reflection from someone who uses these tools every day and still prefers to keep a human hand on the wheel. 2025 arrived with the promise of being the “Year of Agentic AI,” the moment when personal AI agents would finally step into our workflows and start doing things for us instead of just answering questions. And for a brief moment, it really did feel like something new was taking shape. Tools like Perplexity and Comet Browser had flashes of genuine potential — the kind that made people think, “Okay, maybe this is it.” But the momentum didn’t last. The personal agent revolution never quite materialized. Instead, the real movement happened at the enterprise level, where “AgentOps” suddenly became a job title and companies started wrangling fleets of AI agents like digital livestock. Meanwhile, the personal tools that seemed so promising at the start of the year quietly lost steam. Somewhere in the middle of all that, a more grounded philosophy around AI began to take shape—not just for me, but for plenty of creators who’ve been experimenting, building, and paying attention. It’s less about hype and more about how these tools actually fit into a creative life. For many of us, AI works best as a collaborator rather than a replacement. It can accelerate thinking, spark ideas, and help shape the work—but it doesn’t get to take over the steering wheel. There’s still value in keeping a human hand on the controls, especially in a year when “agentic” tools were supposed to do everything for us and instead mostly reminded us why we like being the ones making decisions.