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11 Jul 2025

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They buried Bledisloe beefs over beers. Now the AUNZ team are hunting Lions
Players from the stacked AUNZ Invitational XV have spent the week becoming friends. Now they’re aiming to become Lion tamers as well.

Tigers error gifts Bulldogs a try
A dropped ball by the Tigers falls in the path of Alexis Tauaneai to add another four points to the scoreboard for the Bulldogs.

Tensions boilover as prop sent to the bin
Tension boiled over with just five minutes to go as Angelina Teakaraanga-Katoa was given marching orders for a slap on a rival's face.

Bronx cheers for De Koning amid robbing Peter to pay Paul dilemma
Carlton’s horror run has continued with a 37-point loss to the Brisbane Lions on Thursday night as embattled coach Michael Voss desperately seeks to release a pressure valve.

YouTube cracks down on AI slop — while enabling AI slop
YouTube has an AI slop problem, with both the main site and the booming Shorts section filling up with low-effort crap shoveled in front of viewers by the millions. New policies are trying to demonetize, or sometimes even ban, accounts that take advantage of AI to mass produce garbage. But if Google is upset that it’s suddenly hosting the web’s video dross, it has only itself to blame. Starting on July 15th, and with less than a week of notice, YouTube will be taking a closer look at members of the YouTube Partner Program. This is the monetization side of YouTube videos that makes a career as an independent (or even corporate) YouTube video producer functional. Beginning next week, YouTubers who want to keep their advertising dollars will have to avoid “mass-produced and repetitious content,” as well as “inauthentic” videos. Technically these guidelines or effectively identical policies have been in place long before the current crop of AI-created video and audio tools became widely available. That channel that simply re-uploads movie trailers or collects nothing but Parks & Recreation clips isn’t meeting the threshold of actual creation, so most of those videos were probably demonitized and/or their advertising dollars were sent to the original intellectual property owners. But it seems like Google is adding a bit of language to the policy to make it easier for the company to cast a wide net on the new crop of AI slop. TechCrunch spotted a video from YouTube’s Head of Editorial & Creator Liaison Rene Ritchie, assuaging the fears of authentic YouTube creators who make “reaction or clips” videos. “This is a minor update to YouTube’s long-standing YPP policies, to help better identify when content is mass-produced or repetitive. This type of content has already been ineligible for monetization for years, and it’s content that views often consider spam. That’s it, that’s all.” “Spam” is putting it lightly. Anyone who uses YouTube on a regular basis couldn’t have missed that the de facto home of video on the web is filling up with videos, and especially shorts, that consist of entirely AI-generated images, video, narration, music, and almost certainly scripts. I’ve seen entire music albums from singers that don’t exist (sometimes pretending to be from singers that do), auto-generated and uploaded under the guise that the musical equivalent of pink slime is the authentic brainchild of a human. These channels can even automate most of the uploading and posting process, pumping out dozens of new videos a day and trying the same tactics across multiple channels until something hits. And while most of it disappears into the ether, the ones that do hit — like horrible and deliberately misleading fake trailers for fake movies — can get millions of hits, on videos that are worth less than the emissions it took some AI data center to conjure them up. And that’s without even touching the issues of deliberate misinformation and manipulation. YouTube has put policies in place already that limit what video “creators” can do, requiring them to label videos that use AI tools to generate video, audio, or narration tracks in alternate languages. But of course, that requires those users to self-report most of the time…and if you’re intentionally trying to game the system, you have zero incentive to do that. As someone who uses and enjoys YouTube (with a few important caveats), I applaud this effort. I really do. But I also can’t help but point out that if Google is trying to police YouTube and kick out all the junk, the first door it needs to knock on is its own. Of the many AI slop videos I’ve spotted, one of the most infuriating is the “podcast” format that uses an AI-generated summary of a topic or news article, then sets it to an AI-generated vocal track, often with multiple voices immitating two people with inauthentic pauses and back-and-forth dialog that would make Tommy Wiseau cringe. These videos are obviously running afoul of the newly updated YPP policy…despite the fact that they’re using Google’s own Gemini AI tool to create this “podcast” abomination. And this isn’t some trick or manipulation, it’s a feature that Google advertises itself. Recently Google added full video generation to Gemini under the Veo 3 label, making it available to all users in a public preview. And sure enough, Google is building this into YouTube itself. This will probably be a paid service when it rolls out to YouTube creators, and presumably (hopefully?) it’ll be automatically tagged as AI-generated content when YouTube video producers make use of it. But it would be trivially easy to download the video, scrub it of tags or other identifiers, and re-upload it in a new video without fear of automatic moderation. Look, I’m not an expert, either on managing a video service with billions of users or on selling tools to people who make videos. But it seems to me that Google wants to have its AI-generated video revenue while keeping YouTube as clean of low-effort slop as possible. And from where I’m sitting on the viewer side of things, those two goals seem mutually exclusive.

Former Tiger pounces in new colours
Ebony Prior charges over the line for the Bulldogs to snatch the first points against her former team.

Bunker denies Bass of late game-changer
The Bunker denies Emily Bass of the Tigers of a try due to a forward bounce ruling.

Magpies recall Cox for crunch Gold Coast clash: AFL teams and tips round 18
All the ins and out and how the experts tipped round 18.

Every Windows PC has a secret tool to identify ‘real’ Prime Day deals
There are a number of ways that you can tell whether a Prime Day deal is a good deal, including sites that you can visit, browser plugins, and more. But there’s another, free way, and it’s already on your PC: Microsoft Shopping. If I’m shopping around for the best Thunderbolt dock deals for Prime Day, I usually use Microsoft Edge. The reason is that Microsoft Edge has Microsoft Shopping built right in, and it displays important information like an item’s price history right within the Edge sidebar. Microsoft Shopping is somewhat hit or miss in terms of the products that it tracks — not every product on Amazon is tracked by Microsoft’s shopping tool. But it’s quite useful! Take, for example, when my son asked me to buy him a replacement mouse for Prime Day. As it turns out, Microsoft’s price tracker revealed that the mouse (“20 percent off” or $31.99 for Prime Day) had been $39.99 on July 4 but $25 at the end of June. To me, that’s a classic case of either Amazon or mouse maker Logitech artificially inflating the price so that it could “discount” it for Prime Day. And the tool displayed the history as soon as I opened the shopping page. Mark Hachman / Foundry There are other tools, such as CamelCamelCamel.com or Keepa that also poll Amazon and can deliver price histories. What I like about Microsoft Shopping, though, is that it’s just right there in Edge. How to enable Microsoft Shopping To turn on Microsoft Shopping, go to the Settings menu in Edge, then to “Privacy, search and services,” then “Search and connected experiences”. You’ll see a list of toggled options. The only one you have to enable is “Save time and money with Shopping in Microsoft Edge.” Flip it on. Mark Hachman / Foundry Now, back in your browser, you’ll need to actually click on Microsoft Shopping to actually enable the service and open the sidebar. The upper right-hand-corner of your browser is probably pretty crowded, but there’s a small “tag” icon there. Click it. Doing so will open the sidebar, where you’ll see Microsoft Shopping information. Mark Hachman / Foundry There are three things Microsoft Shopping offers: a price tracker, where you can ask to be notified if the price of a particular product changes over time; a graph that tracks the price over the last year or so; and other sites that carry the item, which may be more or less expensive. I find the price tracker pretty useful, as Edge color-codes it to reflect if the price is headed down or up, or is about the same. Microsoft Shopping isn’t always consistent with its evaluation that a price is “typical” or is headed up, I’ve found. But you can usually get a sense for whether you’re seeing the best price, regardless. It’s also handy to see how prices go up and down, depending upon different market forces. Is all of this information accurate? I can’t say for certain, though in the screenshot below you can see how price rose and fell over last year’s holiday season, for example — and then climbed right back up after. Mark Hachman / Foundry If it’s not, it’s up to you whether you want to visit a competitor or not. Edge doesn’t seem to limit itself to “name” retailers, and you might find yourself on an unknown site, or eBay. If you’re adventurous, you can also sign up for Cashback (formerly Bing Rewards), which promises actual money back on purchases. There is a catch: Microsoft does collect information from you — but, well, so does everyone these days. You’ll have to decide whether Microsoft crosses lines that Amazon, your payment processor, or other retailers have probably crossed, too. It’s up to you. I find Microsoft Shopping pretty useful however. If you’re shopping Prime Day deals and want some more assurance that you’re getting a good deal, then you can turn it on in a click or two. So did I end up buying the mouse? Sure. but I also made sure to make a note to shop more of the early Prime Day deals next year, rather than wait for the official Prime Days “deals” to begin.