Android Headlines claims to have the specs and price for the entire Pixel 11 lineup. What the site shared basically lines up with everything else that we’ve heard in the lead-up to the August 12th event. The Pixel 11 is expected to get a $100 price hike, starting at $899, but will come with 256GB of storage instead of 128GB in the base model. While the entire lineup will sport the new Tensor G6 and Titan M3 chips, the base model Pixel 11 Pro and Pixel 11 Pro XL are both getting that rumored RAM cut to just 12GB, along with price increases to $1,099 and $1,299, respectively.

The Pixel 11 will supposedly ditch the telephoto lens and settle for a dual rear camera setup instead. The pro models appear like they’ll keep the same camera setup from the Pixel 10 lineup. The displays also seem to be largely unchanged from the previous generation. The Pixel 11 Pro Fold wasn’t immune to RAMageddon, either, and will also start with 12GB of RAM and a new price of $1,899.

Fenix Flexin is best known as a member of Shoreline Mafia, a rap duo from Los Angeles. But he’s recently found solo success with the track “Rubberz,” which has climbed to number 58 on the Billboard Hot 100. Almost immediately, though, questions were raised about the song’s origins, with many speculating that it was largely, if not entirely, generated by AI. Fenix has denied those accusations, but done little to dispel them.

Part of the suspicion is certainly due to the fact that the song is a dramatic left turn. Fenix has primarily trafficked in trap-influenced West Coast rap. “Rubberz,” on the other hand, is heavily influenced by ‘80s UK synth pop. The vocal melody is clearly influenced by Morrissey, with Fenix even adopting a fake British accent. But artists are allowed to evolve and experiment. That alone doesn’t prove anything.

Perhaps more telling is the simple quality of the recording. Close inspection reveals a number of artifacts and anomalies that are commonly found in AI-generated music. Hi-hats have a certain brittle quality, the chorus vocals sound like a low-bitrate MP3, and reverb tails haphazardly cut off. 

Speaking with The Verge, songwriter and co-host of the Switched on Pop podcast, Charlie Harding, highlighted the giveaways. “Ghostly backing vocals duck in and out unexpectedly. The drum reverb is full of unnatural digital artifacting reminiscent of a 64kbps MP3 downloaded off of Napster. Because most generative AI companies have trained their model on low-quality MP3s of unlicensed copyrighted material, we hear audibly degraded instrumentation.”

Feeding the song into an AI music detector doesn’t deliver a smoking gun. I ran the track through five different tools, and they all said that there was between 20 and 30 percent chance that it was AI or at least AI-assisted. But those sorts of tools are not necessarily super reliable and advance much more slowly than music-making models themselves.

Some of the supporting materials, however, have tripped up AI detectors. The single’s cover art and a post celebrating its success were both flagged as being AI-generated with over 97 percent certainty by multiple AI image detectors. Similarly, I fed the lyrics into multiple AI writing detectors and Gemini, which agreed they appeared to be written by AI. Producer and YouTuber Curtiss King dropped the lyrics into Claude, and it also flagged multiple signs that the lyrics appeared to be AI-generated.

The lyrics are the sort of logical near-gibberish that AI often spits out. The rhymes are simple and clean in a way that you wouldn’t expect from someone who is a reasonably accomplished rapper. There are no near rhymes or internal rhymes. Instead, everything sticks to a basic AA, BB format that clearly prioritizes the rhyme scheme over actual meaning or narrative development.

Swipin’ cards and stackin’ chips, I saw you sinkin’ ships

Left me standin’ in the pourin’ rain, now I bought a heavy diamond chain

Who is sinking ships? Are we the sinking ships? No clue, this idea never comes back up. Similarly, the individual lines of the chorus might make sense, but when combined are meaningless.

Bankrolls on the table

Watchin’ local cable

Hatin’ that I’m able

Hatin’ that I’m able

Ignoring the “local cable” bit, which is just awkward (and nearly sent King into a rage spiral), what is Fenix able to do? Why does he hate it? The lyrics raise more questions than they answer.

The way the lines are delivered is also odd. Verse three seemingly ends mid-thought on the line, “Not the jewelry.” Harding noted that it has a “complete lack of flow.” He says that, “No half-competent rapper would ever sing the title line ‘I just let the rubber band snap’ in such an awkward manner. The syncopation is highly unusual, emphasizing all the wrong syllables.” He goes on to explain that, “by smashing so many syllables together, it forces the word the onto the downbeat, instead of the word rubber, forcing all of the subsequent syllables to accent with unnatural syncopation.”

Live “performances” of “Rubberz” haven’t done Fenix any favors. The first couple of in-studio appearances featured the rapper awkwardly lip-syncing. At times it seems like the awkwardness of the flow and the lyrics trip him up, as if he can’t remember his own song. Honestly, he’s not even trying that hard to convince anyone that he’s actually singing.

Things only get worse when Fenix actually does sing. It’s abundantly clear in multiple clips that he is incapable of recreating the vocal range and accent from the recording (and that he doesn’t know the lyrics). In many of the clips of live performances, even when he’s singing, they’re simply playing the original vocals over his. His real vocals are kept extremely low in the mix, and the DJ strategically drops out the backing track briefly in an effort to prove the authenticity of the song, but fails.

Fenix has defended himself, saying the difference between the recorded version and any in-the-flesh performance is down to vocal processing, including AutoTune. However, multiple people, including Harding, King, and Anthony Fantano, have disputed this assertion. King compares AutoTune to spellcheck, and that’s not a bad analogy. While yes, it can be pushed to its limits to create unique robotic textures, it’s designed to clean up errors — it would not extend a performer’s vocal range or introduce an accent, as Fantano points out.

Perhaps the most compelling argument for “Rubberz” being authentic is just how bad it is. Harding says, “I would assume it was written by someone who has never written a song using an ‘80s kids practice keyboard.” If the song was indeed created using generative AI, it was clearly made with an inferior model. “I am concerned that audiences find this song interesting when it is created by one of the lesser generative AI music companies with a terrible model. More sophisticated models have already made big improvements in the audible artifacts and awkwardly sung rhythms.”

Fenix has posted clips of what he says are Pro Tools session files. But that doesn’t actually prove anything. Unless he shares the original recording and project files publicly, it’s likely he’ll never shake the AI allegations. And I don’t see that happening anytime soon.

A bootleg of Spider-Man: Brand New Day was up on X for over seven hours before eventually being pulled. During that time, it reached over 5.9 million accounts and accumulated over 143,000 likes. Other accounts have reposted the leaked film, but none have lasted particularly long, as Disney now seems to be on top of issuing takedown requests.

The leak is unlikely to slow down the box office juggernaut, which is already shattering records. It raked in $72 million in previews this week. The previous record holder was Avengers: Endgame, which grossed $60 million during its previews way back in 2019. Endgame went on to set staggering records for opening weekend, grossing over $1.2 billion worldwide and over $350 million in the US. Spider-Man: No Way Home currently holds the number two spot on the all-time US opening weekend list with $260 million.

Brand New Day could potentially usurp Endgame, though it certainly faces an uphill battle. Between previews and opening day, it’s already grossed $168 million, which puts it ahead of Endgame’s $157.4 million. Sony is keeping its estimates somewhat conservative, saying it expects the latest Spider-Man to pull in $325 million.

The SkyNomad N90 Max is the latest electric SUV from Xiaomi and its first extended-range EV, with a claimed range of over 1,705 km (about 1,059 miles). It will come in both five- and seven-seat configurations, as well as an N90 Max Camping Edition.

One of the big features of the N90 is its highly customizable interior. The front seats rotate 180 degrees, the center armrest slides out to become a small table, and the second row features zero gravity seats with footrests. The Camping Edition adds a pop-up top, a rooftop bed platform, an attachment point for a tent, and a detachable table. Some models will also include a fridge and overhead speakers. Xiaomi is pitching the N90 as a sort of living space on wheels, saying it can be a “studio for one, a cafe for two, a lounge for three, a playground for the whole family.”

The company also unveiled the smaller SkyNomad N70 and N70 Max, which seat five but are built on the same extended range technology platform.

There’s something about a movie like The Room, Troll 2, or Fateful Findings that I find irresistible. These sorts of “so bad they’re good” films are marvelous curiosities where ambition far outstrips resources, ability, and self-awareness to become something much greater than the sum of their parts. Champagne and Bullets (also released as GetEven and Road to Revenge) is a film on par with those classics of outsider cinema. 

The movie is almost entirely the work of one man, John De Hart. Hart wrote, directed, and stars as Rick Bode in the film. He even performs a musical number early in the proceedings — the bizarre “Shimmy Slide.” During the performance, Hart, who was reportedly pumped full of painkillers after throwing out his back, is stiff and looks around the room as if he’s only performing under threat of violence. And somehow, this lifeless performance of a cringey country rocker isn’t the most awkward scene in the movie.

The relationships and interactions between characters in Champagne and Bullets are just as inexplicable and unnatural as those in The Room. Bode and his partner Huck Finney are cops who lose their badges five minutes into the movie. This precipitates the alarmingly quick mental decline of Finney, who is also going through a divorce after discovering his wife has been sleeping around. He fires a handgun through his bills, drinks bleach to get out of prison, and seemingly starts a cult.

Oh, and speaking of cults, a good portion of the plot revolves around the reemergence of Bode’s old girlfriend Cindy, who is fleeing a satanic coven that “sacrificed a human baby.” 

While ostensibly an action film, the fight scenes are few and far between, and staged with all the believability of a theme park stunt show. Hart seemed far more interested in cramming in as much gratuitous nudity as possible. There are three uncomfortably long sex scenes with costar Pamela Bryant, who plays Cindy, all set to songs sung by Hart. In total, they take up 12 minutes of runtime in a movie that is only 90 minutes long. One scene that takes place in a Jacuzzi apparently even led Hart’s girlfriend at the time to break up with him. (Warning: One scene not involving Hart and Bryant does depict a sexual assault.)

If you’re a fan of bad movies, cult classics, or the podcast How Did This Get Made?, you owe it to yourself to go watch Champagne and Bullets. It’s available on Hoopla, Amazon Prime, and Tubi.