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In this week’s edition:

💥 What happens when AI models are trained using AI-generated content?

🥷 A research laboratory in Toronto shows how far hackers will go to deceive their victims

🕺🏻 Yes, this menswear Twitter account has some thoughts on your outfit

🤖 Watch the cozy thriller with killer robots on Apple TV+

What happens when an AI model is trained with AI content? Gibberish and garbage

Generative AI models like ChatGPT have been trained on large amounts of internet content (leading to numerous lawsuits from authors, artists, and publishers) and need new data to continue to improve. As AI-generated data makes its way onto the internet, it will inevitably feed into these new models. What would that mean? for developing generative AI? As Joe Castaldo reports, a new study has found that “training AI models with AI-generated data renders them useless. Text models spout gibberish and image models spit out garbage.” Even a mix of authentic and AI-generated data still results in “minor degradations” that would fail quality controls, according to the researchers. So is this the end of generative AI? Far from it. Read Castaldo’s full story.

A Russian hacker group and spear phishing

The email looks harmless. A colleague asks you to review a PDF file and requires you to “decrypt” the attached file by logging into Gmail or ProtonMail. But the email actually comes from a hacker posing as your colleague who now has access to your online account. This tactic is called spear phishing and has been used in a number of cyberattacks by the Russian hacker group Coldriver. The group is believed to carry out cyberattacks on behalf of Russia’s domestic intelligence service and to track people who oppose the Russian government. An independent Russian news organization and a former American ambassador to Ukraine were both targeted in the attacks.

Rebekah Brown, a senior researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, which recently published a report on Coldr’s cyberattack campaign, said it was frightening how sophisticated the attacks were. “You know who these people are talking to. You know what events they attend. You know what topics they’re interested in or what things they’re actively working on at the moment,” Brown told Globe reporter Alexandra Posadzki.

Google introduces new AI-powered smartphones

On Tuesday, Google unveiled the next generation of its Pixel phones, which come standard with the Gemini Live voice assistant. In a demo at the company’s flagship event, Made by Google, the assistant held real-time conversations and successfully responded to prompts like “Write an email to a professor explaining, ‘I’m sick and need an extension.'” However, this failed twice when Google moderator Dave Citron took a photo of a Sabrina Carpenter concert poster and asked Gemini Live to check his calendar to see if he had time when she came to San Francisco, revealing that the event was indeed live and that AI assistants aren’t perfect yet. The new Pixel phones, which will be available between late August and early September, are the tech giant’s latest attempt to capture a larger market share. In Canada, Google accounted for just 4 percent of the smartphone market. market in 2023, behind Samsung with 26 percent and Apple with 59 percent.

The menswear account is what keeps me at X

Things I learned about menswear from the X-account @dieworkwear: A suit collar that gapes at the neck is a sign of poor fit. Pairing a jacket with skinny jeans will give you Popsicle stick legs. Light brown belts never match dark grey suits. As @dieworkwear, Canadian-born author Derek Guy has amassed a million followers for his informative explainers of menswear and his scathing fashion-related critiques of politicians, public figures and internet trolls. His rise began two years ago with a post Criticism of Barstool Sports founder David Portnoy for selling $2,400 watches made from just $40 worth of components, and he has continued his fashion criticism of figures such as Piers Morgan and Jordan Peterson. It also helped that his account seemingly ended up on everyone’s “For You” page, a new algorithm-driven feed introduced when Elon Musk bought Twitter.

Guy still doesn’t know why the algorithm favors his posts, but he’s using his viral fame to help men around the world look their best. As reporter Andrea Woo reports, Guy has heard from people who have found his posts useful, including men who bought their wedding suit based on his advice. A little proof that good things are still happening on X.

What else we read this week:

On these solar farms in Texas, 6,000 sheep help mow the grass (Fast Company)

The most important moments from Elon Musk’s interview with Trump (Vox)

The end of noise-cancelling headphones (The New Yorker)

Money for adults

De’Longhi Burr Coffee Grinder, $100

If you are a coffee drinker, there is a a certain point on the road to adulthood where you switching from buying instant coffee and pre-ground beans to whole beans. (Regular Lately readers know I take coffee seriously, even when camping.) This last evolution, at least for me, came after I immersed myself in the world of niche coffee blogs, forums, and subreddits and became radicalized by the idea that if you don’t like drinking caffeinated sewage juice, you need to grind your own beans. And not just any grinder, but a conical burr coffee grinder, which uses two rotating grinding surfaces to grind the beans instead of blades.

Coffee grinders with burrs can cost over $1,000, but there are cheaper options for less serious home baristas. I’ve been using this De’Longhi coffee grinder with burrs every morning for five years, and I’m impressed with the various coarseness settings I’ve used for drip and French press coffee, as well as the speed and overall consistency of the grounds. Now, before all you coffee lovers flood my inbox telling me that this grinder is bad for espresso or has inappropriate burrs, I hear you. But if you’re looking for an entry-level grinder that costs around $100, I stand by that.

Culture Radar

AppleTV+ Sunny is your cozy summer watch with killer robots

If you want to add a “sci-fi comedy-drama set in near-future Japan that makes you emotionally attached to a robot” to your summer watchlist, then I would like to recommend the following: Sunny on Apple TV+. Rashida Jones plays Suzie Sakamoto, who is reeling from the disappearance of her husband and son in a plane crash. Suzie is given Sunny, a cheerful household robot that her husband programmed especially for her. They form an unlikely friendship and set out together to find out what really happened to Suzie’s family and discover the truth behind a hacker code that could turn companion robots into murderous machines.

Set in not-so-far-away Kyoto, the series features many technologies that are on the verge of breakthrough, such as ubiquitous homebots, in-ear translation devices, and self-driving cars. But showrunner Katie Robbins has also deliberately imagined a future without digital screens: phones are like earbuds, and TVs resemble wafer-thin Japanese shoji screens. Aside from the potentially deadly robots, the future looks cozy. The season finale is September 4, so you still have time to watch the series.

More technology and telecommunications news:

Nuvei CEO Phil Fayer on the dangers of running a publicly traded technology company – and why he’s taking it private

CRTC expands policy requiring certain telecom giants to offer fiber access to their competitors

Alphabet expands AI-generated summaries for Google searches to six new countries