The Gargle - Lying and tech | Gen Z using AI | Shoe weasel

Episode Date: November 29, 2024

Dan Ilic and Athena Kugblenu join host Alice Fraser for episode 184 of The Gargle - all of the news, and none of the politics. 🤐 Lying and technology🤖 Gen Z using AI👟 Shoe weasel 🐻 Bear suit crimes📱 ReviewsWatch on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/@BuglePodcastSupport Bugle podcasts here https://www.thebuglepodcast.com/donateWritten by Alice Fraser, Dan Ilic and Athena KugblenuProduced by Ped Hunter, with executive production from Chris SkinnerHOW TO SUPPORT THE GARGLE- Keep The Gargle alive and well by joining Team Bugle with a one-off payment, or become a Team Bugler or Super Bugler to receive extra bonus treats!https://www.thebuglepodcast.com/donate Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Visit go.acast.com slash ads to get started today. This is a podcast from The Bugle. The tent stands white against the rolling English countryside. Its meringue peaks gleaming under a hesitant British sun. The air is thick with the mingling sense of butter, vanilla and faintly overheated camera equipment promising the deeply soothing excitement of yet another season of the Great British Bake-Off. Inside, countertops gleam, mixers hum, and the watchful eyes of the judges turn to catch the best light. But somewhere in the tent, among the innocent flower-dusted smiles and

nervous glances, a murderer stands, pretending to preheat their oven. A piercing scream shatters the sugary serenity, a body crumpled by an open oven, faced down in a pool of cherry red glaze. Scattered round the lifeless form shards of shattered bakeware, a mangled recipe card, and the gargle. Welcome to The Gargle, the Sonic glossy magazine to the Bewells audio newspaper. For A Visual World, I am your host, Alice Fraser, bringing you all of the news and none of the politics. Your guest editors for this week's edition of the magazine are Athena Kuglainu. Welcome. Thank you for having me.

That's a delight. And Dan Illich, how are you? It's good to be with you. I am very sweaty in my Southern hemisphere. Well, before we sit together in the soaking sauna that is this week's Top Stories, let's have a look at the front cover of this week's magazine. The front cover of this week's magazine is Francis Ford Coppola standing on the top of a tower of unsold Megalopolis DVDs, teetering precariously. And the satirical cartoon is the faces of the people who were

watching Megalopolis, a commentary in themselves. This week's top story is the news that a Stanford professor of lying and technology has been accused of lying about technology. Athena, you understand technology. Can you unpack this story for us? I understand technology and I understand bloody liars. Okay, so we've got a guy, okay, and he is like a professor of lying, okay, and he's decided to demonstrate how technology can lead to misinformation. And he works at Stanford, and I know nothing about Stanford, it's that they talk about

it a lot in movies, so it's a good university. Like, yeah, I went to Stanford, and I think the aliens are coming. Like, so the aliens are coming, and someone from Stanford says that it's happening. So this is a good university because it's in the coming. Like, so the aliens are coming. As someone from Stanford says that it's happening. So this is a good university because in the movie Hollywood says so, and he studies misinformation and he wrote a paper, right? And you cite other papers when you write a paper, he cited papers, get this guys that do not exist. He made it up.

So what is real anymore? Why is professor of lying, writing a paper on misinformation using misinformation? Is anything real? Do new socks feel like new socks or is it the matrix? I don't know who to trust. I'm flabbergasted. It's not even artisanal fibbing. He didn't even fake his own citations. People are suspecting this as being AI hallucinations of the citations where he's gone to one of these engines and said, oh, what are the citations treating… This is one of the problems of the large language models is that people treat them like they're a search engine, but they are a search engine that cheats on its homework because if they don't know the answer, they will just make it up. And you can't check because Google's f**ked itself.

Yeah, Google f**ked up. I saw someone with a Google search today of Steven Spielberg and they put a screen cap of what Google images came back and Google images came back with several pictures of old men that were generated in AI that looked nothing like Steven Spielberg. of old men that were generated in AI that looked nothing like Steven Spielberg. You can't even trust Google Images anymore because Google Images is harvesting its own images, harvesting AI images thinking that they're Steven Spielberg and they're not. Oh yeah, information is done for. I agree with you, Athena. Information is over. There's been

too much quantitative easing of information. For a long time, we didn't have any information, but then information just came through. They're like, we got to get more information out. We need more information. We'll fix the information economy. Now the information economy is too full of information and the information economy is bankrupt. We are all done.

We need to detox everything when it comes to do with anything with information. No more information. What we need is we need to bring back CD-ROMs because we never had this problem with CD-ROMs and we'll bring back incarta. Nothing was wrong with incarta. You put your CD-ROM in and you type in butterflies or whatever your homework was and you got your homework and you cut and paste whatever you needed and then you got an A. And that was it. And no one bad as an island. No one bad as an island.

If you'd like to come over to my house, I did print the internet in 1998 and I do have a printed copy of all the information available to humankind from 1998 and it's in my cupboard. So you're more than welcome to come around and browse through that, leaf through that at your own leisure. I think you're so right, Dan. I think it's information inflation. In the olden days, you used to be able to buy a loaf of bread for a song, and now you have to take a wheelbarrow of facts even to get a slice of bread to make fairy bread on for your child's starving birthday.

I think this is pretty devastating. Do you have a solution, Dan? I don't have a solution, but I know this is a podcast bereft of politics, but I do like the actors in this story who were saying, who were ripping this guy apart, were Republicans saying, no, we need freedom of speech. Our machines need to have the freedoms that we all have, like speech and guns. Please be guns next. Yes, please give these machines guns to shoot us all. Hopefully they should have been bullets. I mean, that would be ideal that they've

manufactured these bullets as well. Can you imagine like an Apple gun? Sorry, sorry, go on, go on. There you go. An Apple smartwatch gun and it tells you how many steps you've done. It's got a little heart rate monitor on it and stuff like that. Why not bring health technology into guns? That's all I'm saying. I think it's a great idea because you don't buy... Just like printers, guns make their money on the bullets. And so Apple could sell you bullets as well, which would be great, each with a brand new

chip. One would go twice as fast as the bullet from the world, which would be great, each with a brand new chip. One would go twice as fast as the bullet from the year before. It'll be great. Your ad section now because you can't be what you can't buy. And this episode of the podcast is brought to you by Couples Hiking for people who want to have the same arguments but with blisters. Find out how life-changing the view from the top of that mountain isn't when the only thing you take away is sore quads. Couples hiking. Take only photographs. Leave behind only your previous certainty that your partner

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Our next top story is that apparently while Generation Z reports being incredibly afraid of AI, most of Generation Z are using AI. Dan Ilic, you're not so far removed from Gen Z. Can you unpack this story for us? Oh, thank you. As my mother, Reba Wilson, would say, I'm looking younger and younger every day. Thanks, mum. Yeah, Gen Z. I didn't think I'd be the old man saying this, but God, they don't like to work, do they, those Gen Z? No, apparently according to this Axios article, 93% of Gen Z in between the

ages of 22 and 27 are using one or two or more AI tools each week as part of their jobs. You have to admire that. That other 7% that aren't using AI, they're kicking it old school. They're using their brain to do labor. They're like the new hipster class. They're so cool. They're using Microsoft Word from 2015. Like they know stuff. They probably go ahead and turn Grammarly off as well. 79% of millennials say they use two or more of these tools a week. That's a relief to me because as an elder millennial, I read the first line of this story and I thought, oh my God, this article is just going to be the geriatric millennials like me who are being very comfortable with the phrase, back in my day.

So yeah, yeah, look, here's the thing. I do feel sorry for a certain class of people who do work in information labor, namely, Philippine assistance. Because I don't know if you have this in the UK, Athena, but in Australia, a lot of the executive class have assistance in the Philippines or had

where they would get them to answer emails and things like that. Now, I have a friend who is actually going through a divorce and she gets all of her emails sent to her assistant in the Philippines from her ex-wife and then gets them translated into a much friendlier tone. a much friendlier tone because they talk and get those emails forwarded to her to a separate account. And then she gets to reply to them with the most vitriolic replies ever. And they go back to the Philippines and then this woman in the Philippines takes those emails and re-civilizes this conversation back to her ex-wife. Truly the devil's threesome. We're not thinking about this kind of knowledge worker

in Southeast Asia. They're gonna be losing all of their jobs because Gemini can go ahead and do this straight away. In fact, for this podcast, I'm sorry, Alice, I don't know what your AI policy is, is I asked Gemini to please summarize this article with three jokes. And here we go. I mean, I'll just give you one of them because the other two are too terrible.

AI might have your job someday, but hey, at least you have more time to perfect your avocado toast while robots do all the work. Thank you. Gemini. Thank you so much. I mean, do you want one more? Here's another you. I'll just give you another one. Even though everyone secretly uses AI at work, young people are the only ones who brag about it. Guests admitting to using fancy new tech is the new, I brought my lunch from home for millennials. Look, it's still early days for Gemini, but there are two almost jokes there.

And I can see in 10 years time that our podcasts like this are just gonna be scraped for our audio and they're gonna be making jokes like this at each other, put it into audio and then republish for other people to listen. No one will know what is real anymore. I'm surprised that any millennials or Gen Zers are getting away with not using AI at the moment, because it seems

to be every single business is like attached an AI assistant to its front page and like desperately, like someone offering a Vegemite sandwich to someone just arrived in Australia. They're like, come on, try it, try it, try it, even though it's not what you want. And actually much like Vegemite, AI is better the less you use it as all good. Yeah. I mean, nobody wants these tools. Please, please take these tools away. I'm sure there are brilliant use cases for them, but it's not like signing up for a bus pass, you know? It's sort of getting out of hand. In this article, they're saying, oh, we use AI to get out of the drudgery of work. What kind of drudgery? The actual work?

If you're paid to take notes in meetings and a machine comes along and takes those notes, wouldn't it be clever of you to take those bloody notes? Otherwise you don't have a job anymore. And also the last time I went to a meeting when I had a normal job, it was quite important to listen to what was being said in that meeting

because you tended to have to go to a meeting to kind of get information so you could know what to do next. So if now the computer knows and you don't know, the computer is now more valuable than you and all of a sudden it's the computer that's going to Christmas parties. It's the computer that's going to the executive box in Arsenal. You know, it's you, it's not you, it's the bloody MacBook enjoying the canapes. And you're thinking, why am I doing that? Well, you should have picked up a pen, shouldn't you?

Um, these kids, and let's be real now, we're older millennials and these kids are going to be wiping our bums in 40 years time, right? We need to be getting these, we need to get in and pull their fingers out. Because obviously that was a turn of phrase. But if they're not learning the meaning of hard work now, when I need someone to cut up my banana, are they going to do it? Or are they going to be sat there like looking at their iPhone going, cut banana now, please? This is a real problem for us in the future.

Get these kids not doing. If you can't take notes now, how are you going to brush my teeth? Is what I'm saying. To be slightly contrarian about this, maybe this is like actually revealing the chasm in work culture of absolute bullshit nonsense work that never needed to be done in the first place. You know, if, same with universities. I think we need to go back to the like old school universities where it was just like

13 monks in a room and you get your degree by having a chat and they'd be like, oh, well, he seems smart, make him a professor. Bring it back to that. None of this like, if AI is just going to get better at cheating at essays, we need to take exams back to the point where it was like a duel with your professor and if you kill him, you're the new professor. Like, bring it back old school. That's really good. Yeah, that's like hands-on work.

Because as a young person, when you're entering the workforce, you are given all these manual jobs to do because that's just how you did it when you were coming up in the workforce. So I relished the times when I got to, you know, give somebody notes to take or something like that, because it was like, yeah, right of passage. I didn't have to do it. Woo. Likewise, I'm really paying attention to a lot of executives who are saying that AI is the future.

So I'm really practicing that sentence in front of the mirror. AI is the future and we should be investing in AI just in case someone sees me say it and wants to give me an executive position where I get to implement AI in a library or something. Well, I mean, I reckon we need to be replacing the executives with AI. All Filipinos. Let's just free the Filipinos, man, and let's turn things around. We work for you now. We work for you.

Let's do it. Give me a call. I'm available. I've got AI doing the rest of my work. And that brings us to our reviews section. As you know, each week we ask our guest editors to review something out of five stars. Dan Illich, what have you brought in for us this week? I have been a recent homeowner as of the last year, and I have to tell you there is few

things that are more satisfying in my life than mowing the lawn. And so I'm reviewing mowing the lawn today. There is a certain satisfaction in going back and forth across my lawn with a machine that gives my lawn a little haircut. And one thing that kind of really buoys my enthusiasm for doing the lawn is that my life is so busy these days that I rarely get time to listen to podcasts. So if the lawn is long, I mean, I know I've got at least two or three American politics podcasts that can get me through it and I'm going to have a really good time with it.

That's a humble brag about lawn size if I ever heard one. Well, I'm on the corner block, right? So I've kind of got to do, and the other thing is, I'm on the corner block and also I have an electric mower and the mower often needs to recharge. So it's not like I'm pumping fossil fuels through my mower to get it done. I'm plugging it into the sun,

getting some sunshine into my mower and getting the grass cut so I can listen to Pod Save America. But I was listen to Pod Save America. But I was talking to my friend who does have quite a big lawn. He's Jacob Round, who actually cuts my podcast. He lives on a big acreage, far out, far, far away from any major city down in Bargo. And he sent me a picture of him pushing a lawn mower in his amazing paddock. And I was like, Jacob, you've got to get a ride on. He's like, no, I can't get a ride on because it takes away from my podcast listening.

I just really love that. I just love that. I love that idea. Like he'd rather mow the lawn with his push mower than get a ride on because he's got podcast listening to do too. Out of five stars, how would you rate? lawn with his push mower they get a ride on because he's got podcasts listening to do too. Out of five stars, how would you rate? I give it three and a half.

It's pretty good, but not super great. I think I'm enamored of the idea that your lawn mower is powered by the sun because you know what else is powered by the sun? Your lawn mower's nemesis, the grass. All we're doing is battling the sun against each other. Oh no. The ultimate own goal. Athena, what have you brought in for us this week? I've brought in something that everyone comments on it when they see it. So I feel like I need to share it with the world. And it's my massive phone, but it's not a massive phone. It's a normal sized phone

in a child proof cover. So my son is a thrower. And if people aren't familiar with what a thrower might be, it's a child who throws everything. Okay. That's basically it. So my son's a thrower and I don't know if he's going to be a fast bowler or a rioter, but pray him for one of them. I don't know if he's going to be a fast bowler or a rioter, but pray him for one of them. He'd be good in either situation, a test or a riot. But this phone can be thrown off a house. True story. It could be thrown into a bathtub and it has been, and it's a bathroom as well. And I just want to add, but the only problem is it's screwed into place.

It's like Robocop. You knowoCop has to unscrew his helmet. It's like his helmet. That is genuinely how I have to take off this phone cover. I've got to unscrew it. Um, but I would recommend this phone cover to anyone, even if your child is not a thrower or even if you don't around throwers, um, because it's a good conversation starter, because not one person has not failed to mention how big my phone is. And I don't like talking. So it's been quite useful for someone like me who just would prefer to sit in silence because, oh, your phone's big. I'm like, thank

God, let's start talking. So yeah, my phone is protected and it's done something about my awkwardness as well. What about getting, have you thought about getting a contract? A new son, yes. Oh, sorry. I was going to say, probably even more terrible. Have you thought about phone Zempik for your phone? Phone Zempik? Oh, like to deflate my phone.

Yeah, to deflate your phone. To deflate my phone. I have thought about it. And I think, to be honest, my phone should just have more willpower. I think my phone should use willpower actually. So I've thought about it, but I'm not going to succumb. I'm not. I also share my phone with you. You don't know if you can tell, but my phone is actually stuck together via sticky tape. I've got sticky tape holding shards of glass in my phone together because not only is your son a thrower, but I also am a thrower. You can't come in my house, ever.

You're not allowed. Okay. Every listener feels like their favorite podcast is speaking just to them. If you're a marketer, your brand's message can do the same. With podcasts ranking number one against all other media for good use of time, good for learning and mentally engaging, podcast ads are proven to be one of the most effective marketing channels. Have your brand heard everywhere with Acast. Our podcasts are available on all apps and the only way to reach their listeners is through

Acast. Visit go.acast.com slash ads to get started today. Shoe story now, and this is the news that a kindergarten in Japan has finally solved a mystery of shoe theft in a surprising way. Athena Kublino, you wear shoes sometimes. Can you unpack this story for us? Absolutely. AP have reported this, the most prestigious of the news organizations. Don't

quite know why, but it just is. So that's how it is. Tokyo, when you see the brackets, AP, closed brackets, they're all official. They really are dead because AP said so. So in the Tokyo office of AP, police thought a shoe thief was on the loose at kindergarten, which is a disgusting foot fetish if I've ever heard one. A shoe thief, because children's feet are the worst smelling feet in the world. Like what have you been doing? Oh my, what do you eat all day? Shitting cheese.

It's disgusting. So if you're stealing, if you're stealing children's shoes, you've got a real problem. Like children's school shoes are like, so let's get that out of the way. So police thought a shoe thief was on the loose at a kindergarten in Southwestern Japan. Okay. But luckily they film everything in Japan and there was a security camera and it caught the culprit. It was a weasel and this weasel had this tiny shoe in its mouth and it was basically stealing the shoes. And they said, and I quote, it was great it turned out to not be a human being. I could not agree more. Because if it was a human being, burn them, burn that human on the stake,

because that's not appropriate behavior at all. There's no one and only fans going, kind of have a child shoe, please. No one's paying for that. So you weirdo. But it was a weasel. And obviously, as we know in Japan, in lots of cultures, you're not supposed to wear shoes indoors. So if you like shoes, go live in Japan because they're everywhere.

But, and weasels obviously realize that. So I don't know if this weasel moved to Japan or if it's a Japanese weasel. We don't know if it's an immigrant weasel. But get this, it stole 15 shoes before they called the police. Can you imagine? So nobody was bothered about these shoes disappearing. And then instead of kind of like doing their own investigations, they called the police, which I think is quite a step up. If someone steals like, you know, the safe, the children, I've got, yeah, I call the police, these things are quite important.

But if shoes go missing, you just think, for me, it's not a police matter. And anyway, it's not a police matter. It's an animal matter. For me, the immediate assumption, if people are stealing single children's shoes, is that they're making haunting tableaus because there's something very existential about a single child's shoe just sitting on a wall somewhere. Really like makes you think. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Ring a ring a rosie. It's very, it's very terminated to judgment day. Like that's all that's left. You know, after AI killed us all, the only thing that will be left is one single child shoe and cockroaches. That's it.

Um, but there's a lovely detail in this story. The weasel, it only stole white canvas shoes because they were the lightest. It was a lazy weasel. It likes shoes, but not that much. I'm not, I'm not breaking my back for it, you know, um, which is hilarious. See that doesn't sound like a lazy weasel to me. That sounds like a weasel who's got a penchant for PIMS and tennis on the weekend. Posh weasel.

A middle-class weasel. Oh my God. It's hilarious. On its yacht. Yeah, but people stay woke. It's still on the loose. That's the last sentence in this article. I'll show you that.

It's still on the loose, guys. Mail your shoes down. Oh, but people stay woke. It's still on the loose. That's the last sentence in this article. I'll show you. You know, it's still on the loose guys. Um, nail your shoes down. No, don't do that. They've, they've covered the shoes with a net like strawberries. So it hasn't hidden the shoes.

So the weasel can look at the shoes like longingly, but it can't get to them because of the net, which I think is quite cruel actually. But there you go. It's a good moniker, isn't it? To be called the shoe weasel is pretty good. Like, ah, the shoe weasel, he's taken the shoe again. As a jewel thief, you know, steal the diamonds and leave a single haunting child's shoe in a safe so that people are too existential to call the police. It's like the Zodiac murder, it's this calling card.

Instead of a watch, it's just like a little shoe. Little canvas plimsoll. And that brings us to our final story of this week's episode of The Gargle. More animal news or is it news now, which is a bear that has been damaging luxury cars has been unmasked. Dan Illich, you are a man with a series of faces. Can you unpack this story for us? Yes, thank you. And like the Weasel story, this story also, Athena, you'll love to find out, is from the AP as well. The AP, the Associated Press bring in all the animal news to the miracle.

Slow news week on earth, apparently. Okay, so there's been a bit of concern around the San Bernardino Mountains just outside of Los Angeles. Apparently, a bear has been moving into the area where there are lots of really expensive cars, like Mercedeses and Rolls-Royce. There have been photos and videos of this so-called bear ripping into the seats and causing damages to these cars. And it looks like insurance companies have been up for about $142,000 worth of damages. But upon investigation by the Californian insurance department, it wasn't a bear at all. It was merely four people in bear costumes going around, destroying these cars. It is quite remarkable the lengths that these people have gone to

destroy their own cars to get the insurance money for these cars. Look, California does have some bear problems in the north of the state and the high sierras. It's quite often, you would see bears going around and picking at stuff, but not in the sand. The San Bernardino Mountains, they're kind of a bit lower. They're not really the place you would see bears, but somehow they thought this was a good idea. The detectives on the case actually found bear suits in these four people's homes. The big question is, do these four people have attorneys? I don't know. It's just so funny. It's just so funny. It's like, do they four people have attorneys? I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. It's just so funny.

It's just so funny. It's like, do they try out one Mercedes and go, hmm, this Mercedes is too soft. Mercedes is too hard. This Rolls-Royce is just right. It is extraordinary the photos that the AP has found of this bear costume. So you not only got a very fluffy bear costume, but you've got what appears to look like Edward Scissorhands-esque scraping tools

that you can attach to the paws to cause maximum damage. It's like Wolverine claws. Exactly, Wolverine claws. These are bearverines that are going and destroying these cars. And it's so weird because the way the photos have been laid out, it looks like the photos have been laid out, it looks like the bears have kind of got like a little waistcoat, like Yogi Bear. And maybe

these people have just, you know, copped too many cartoons in their life and they mistook a Phantom Rolls Royce for a Picnic Busket. This is such a bizarre story that I think has to be being done in light of like a long con. This is LA after all. So I think that this is like, they're not even planning on the insurance payout. They're planning on the payout for the rights to the movie about the bear gang. Like I think they're playing 4D chess here. Have you seen Cocaine Bear? It's that.

Yeah, cocaine bear. I have not seen cocaine bear, but I have read the title of cocaine bear, so I feel like I've effectively seen cocaine bear. I feel like that's enough I need to know. Everything you need to know is in the title. Insurance fraud bear isn't as catchy as cocaine bear. What if there are no bears? What if all the bears are just people dressing up as bears?

Cause I always think bears look like people just as bears. Don't they? They just kind of stroll around like, hey, they all look like football mascots, don't they? Pandas. All the bears look like people dressed up as bears. So are all the bears people dressed up as bears? That's my question.

Yeah, that would explain why bears are more scared of people than people are of bears. Cause bears just think people are really naked bears. And that brings us to the end of this week's episode of the Gargle. I'm flipping through the ads at the back. Athena, have you got anything to plug? Yeah, still the book.

Pitch 2 is the most epic fibs. If you live in the UK, you can buy it for cheaper delivery charges than if you live outside the UK, but you can still buy it if you live outside the UK. We'll just pay more for delivery, but that means the words will taste better when you read them. So that's so well worth buying the book full of fibs from history. Wonderful. And Dan, have you got anything to plug? Yeah, I've got a podcast. It's called 8 Rational Fear, but also I've got a fun

web series, which I made with an amazing Melbourne talent called Millie Halton. It is called Longhead. It is launched on TikTok. It stars Sam Campbell from UK's Taskmaster as the titular Longhead and it's done about four million views in the last few weeks. They will put it up. So go to thisislonghead on TikTok and check out the very stupid animated series that we've created there. That sounds amazing.

If I ever download TikTok, I will do that. What you need to do is go and find some 20 year olds who know how to use AI to create it for you. I'm Alice Fraser. You can find me online at patreon.com slash Alice Fraser. It's a one stop shop full of my standout specials, podcasts and blogs, as well as my twice weekly writers meetings and my weekly salons where we all get in room and have a chat like this, but you'll have written fewer jokes. If you come along to the salon, I assume. You can also buy my book, which is called A Passion for Passion at unbound.com.

That will be out and in your hands on the 6th of February. I'll also be doing a book tour in the UK in February, So have a look on my website, alicefrazor.com for the dates as they emerge or just keep following the Patreon. I will announce all the dates there. patreon.com slash alicefrazor. This is a Bugle podcast and Alice Fraser production. Your editor is Ped Hunter. Your executive producer is Chris Skinner. I'll talk to you again next week. Bye. You can listen to other programs from The Bugle, including the bugle, catharsis,

tiny revolutions, top stories, and the gargle, wherever you find your podcasts. Hey, it's Mitch from Side Note Podcast, and I'm here to tell you about the new Google Pixel 9 powered by Gemini. Anyone who knows me knows the Pixel has always been my favorite out of all the phones I've ever had. Now with Gemini built in, it's basically my personal AI assistant. Since I'm truly terrible at keeping up with emails, I use Gemini to give me summaries of my inbox, which is a lifesaver. And if I'm feeling stuck creatively, I just ask Gemini for help

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