It’s Sunday, meaning it’s time to recap our winner and loser from the last week.
Undoubtedly, the biggest event this week was Amazon’s Prime Big Deal Days sale. Hopefully, you got a chance to grab a bargain during this midpoint between Prime Day and Black Friday, but what else happened this week?
Ring announced its new AI-powered Smart Video Search, allowing users to search for specific scenarios in their Ring camera recordings. Nintendo, meanwhile, forewent a Switch 2 reveal in favour of showcasing its new Alarmo alarm clock.
Keep reading to discover our winner and loser from this week.
Winner: Whoop
Our winner this week is Whoop as the company added a simple but long-overdue feature to its wearables.
After a decade spent “bashing” step-tracking, Whoop founder and CEO Will Ahmed announced that the feature would finally be coming to the Whoop Strap.
Ahmed took to X to explain why he had changed his mind on the matter and finally relented on bringing steps to the Whoop Strap.
According to the CEO, research shows that a step count of over 8200 a day lowers a person’s risk of developing certain chronic diseases and obesity. On top of this, some users had taken to doubling up on devices as they couldn’t get all the insights they needed from the Whoop Strap.
Lastly, and perhaps most obviously, users apparently really wanted it.
The Whoop Strap 4.0 is a helpful and informative wearable and the best fitness tracker we’ve tested for recovery tracking, but it focuses less on traditional metrics, like steps, miles and calories burned and more on its strain score and HR readings. It’s good to see Whoop take a step back and add a basic feature like a step counter for those who want it.
Loser: Google
Our loser is Google after the company gained flack for not taking steps to remove to label AI-generated images in its Google Image search.
This issue came to the internet’s attention through a post by @notengoprisa on X captioned “Google está muerto”. The post appeared to show a screenshot from Google Images highlighting the huge number of AI-generated images that are recalled when searching for a baby peacock.
The post was shared to the r/graphic_design subreddit (via CreativeBloq) with users complaining that “generative AI really seems to be the most overwhelmingly net-negative tech advancement in my lifetime” and “Stock websites are littered with AI garbage”.
One user even shared that they make sure to enter ‘before:2022’ into the search bar alongside every image search to ensure they only receive results posted before AI art’s huge search in popularity.
Regardless of what your take is on AI art, it’s clear that Google needs to find a way to tag or filter AI art before Google Image results are overrun with gibberish text and extra fingers.
