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Elon's racist AI, social media ban tech trial results and Gemini reads your texts

Plus: Of course you can play Quake on outdated medical equipment

Author

Cam Wilson
July 09, 2025

Edition 2370

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The News

Turns out the AI owned by a radicalised billionaire has been radicalised

Elon Musk’s Grok AI has started posting so many anti-semitic slurs and dogwhistles on Twitter that the company had to change its instructions (The Verge). Grok, powered by Musk’s company xAI, was recently updated to be “politically incorrect”, according to the billionare. So, it immediately started calling itself “MechaHitler” and saying that “folks with surnames like ‘Steinberg’ (often Jewish) keep popping up in extreme leftist activism.” (NBC News)

The Sizzle: It’s not complicated. The world’s richest man with his own history of anti-semitic comments (CNN) created a mega-racist AI bot — remember its obsession with white genocide? — because that’s what he believes. The problem isn’t that it’s offensive, but that it’s too obvious. X, formerly Twitter, is a lost cause at this point, but remember that xAI is being used in other places with companies like Microsoft rolling it out to its customers (TechCrunch).

My take? Not good!

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Teen social media ban tech trial results show tech isn’t as ready as was said by the people running the trial

The early results from the trial testing the teen social media ban age checking tech has cast doubt on the claim that it’s ready to go, according to experts involved (Crikey, $). Several experts who’ve seen some of its data, and according to snippets of the report I saw, say they’re concerned about the error rates, surprisingly little testing, and that a majority of companies involved don’t yet have commercially ready tech.

The Sizzle: Last month, the people running the $6.5 million government-funded trial said age checking tech was ready to go. But they didn’t actually publish their proof — which is a bizarre, and ultimately non-rigorous, way to go about investigating something like this. I think the question is: if the evidence is so compelling, why are people running the trial acting like it’s not?

Taken from the leaked draft results

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Google’s Android AI can now read your messages because, I mean, you probably want it to

Android’s AI Gemini assistant is starting to read data from and interact with WhatsApp, Phone and Message apps even if you haven’t turned on its “app integration” setting (TechRadar). This has led to some privacy concerns(X dot com) while others are framing it as a pro-privacy decision because Gemini will be able to access that app data without being needing access to all your apps data, and without sending it to Gemini’s cloud servers (according to the aptly named Android Police and 9to5Google).

The Sizzle: Speaking frankly, sometimes there’s too much knee jerk alarmism about “app wants to access data” without figuring out the context. Most of us wants our phone’s assistant to be able to read its messages! I want to be able to tell it to text my mum with a friend’s contact details. Doing things like Gmail’s new “manage subscriptions” feature (TechCrunch) is built on be able to access data. The more important question is not whether it can access the data — but how it treats it.

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Leftovers

  • More telco consumers seek Ombudsman support (ACMA) 

  • Qantas begins contacting customers with data breach details (CyberDailyAU) 

  • AI chatbots are ‘poisoning data’, regulator warns universities (The Australian, $) 

  • NSW gov to house drones permanently at traffic hotspots (ITNews) 

  • Uber rakes in $150m from Australian ad business (AFR, $) 

  • Telstra to slash jobs in major cull (SMH, $) 

  • Momentum builds — slowly — in Australian real time payments (Capital Brief, $) 

  • Cyborg beetles are now a thing as university shrinks first responders (Pickr)

  • Georgia court throws out earlier ruling that relied on fake cases made up by AI (The Register) - Follow-up from the case mentioned in an earlier Sizzle this week. 

  • The [US] military might finally win the right to repair (Engadget) 

  • People Are Using AI Chatbots to Guide Their Psychedelic Trips (WIRED, $) 

  • Cloudflare: We Will Get Google To Provide A Way To Block AI Overviews (Search Engine Roundtable) 

  • Tennis players claim Wimbledon’s new AI system is getting calls wrong (The Telegraph) 

  • Details on AirPods with cameras revealed by new research (Apple Insider)  

  • Samsung’s event spoiled by massive last-minute leak (The Verge) 

  • Rising prices of DDR4, DDR5, GDDR6 RAM set to cause havoc on PC, smartphone and GPU prices (TechRadar) 

  • Activision took down Call of Duty game after PC players hacked, says source (TechCrunch) 

  • Mastodon is improving profiles and getting ready for quote posts (The Verge) 

  • Thunderbird 140 released (LWN) 

  • Firefox is fine. The people running it are not (The Register) 

  • The curious rise of giant tablets on wheels (Ars Technica)

  • Mike Lindell lost defamation case, and his lawyers were fined for AI hallucinations (Ars Technica)

Discuss these links in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Oh, Also

Of course you can play Quake on an oscilloscope

Have you ever wondered whether it’s possible to play Quake on an analog oscilloscope? While none of these words are in the bible, I’m glad to say that the answer to this absurd question about medical equipment is yes (although it doesn’t appear someone has done it for DOOM — yet)

Discuss in the Sizzle Slack or forum.

Bargains

Electrical & electronics

Computing

Mobile

The End

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The Sizzle is created on Gadigal land and acknowledges the traditional owners of country throughout Australia, recognising their continuing connection to land, water and community. I pay my respect to them and their cultures and to elders both past and present.

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