AI tattletale

Good morning. Netflix reality dating show/twisted social experiment Love Is Blind is getting a Canadian spin-off. If you’re unfamiliar, the show has unlucky-in-love singles connect without seeing each other, then asks them to get engaged before meeting face-to-face.

It’s the latest U.S. reality show to get a Canadian version, which is clearly a hot trend atm (see also: Canada Shore and Summer House Canada). Casting is open, so if you want to find your soulmate — or maybe become a villain despised by the internet — enquire within!

Today’s reading time is 6 minutes.

Markets: Canada’s main stock index inched up yesterday, which was still enough to set another record closing high. One of the big winners was Pet Valu, which saw its shares surge 9.3% after posting an earnings beat. 

The internet’s best-selling author is about to get the recognition it deserves. 

What happened: Anthropic is rolling out a new invisible watermark that will be embedded in any text, image, or file generated by its AI models that were released after August 2, making it far easier for online platforms to detect and flag content generated by Claude. The company says it's working on adding the function to its older models, as well. 

Why it’s happening: Whether it's social media posts, articles, or music, companies have realized how fed up people are with AI slop. Spotify announced yesterday that it would start labelling AI artists and blocking them from its recommended playlists, while Substack launched a tool last month that scans posts to flag if they are AI-generated. 

Why it matters: The dead internet theory — the once unlikely-seeming prediction that the entire online ecosystem would be overrun with bots — is eerily close to our reality today. Over half of new articles posted on the internet are AI-generated, nearly 35% of all internet traffic is now from bots, and a quarter of social media posts over 250 words are written by AI. 

Our take: We’ve become accustomed to lawyers citing non-existent AI legal cases in open court, consultants generating reports with fake experts, and even politicians accidentally reading their own chatbot prompts out loud in the provincial legislature. Maybe we’ll soon get to find out who still remembers how to do their jobs without Claude.—LA

Ottawa is readying a trade deal to pitch Trump. With new tariffs on $20 billion worth of Canadian goods set to take effect August 19, trade officials are reportedly planning to present Trump with a trade proposal as soon as Monday. The idea is to give the White House enough time to consider the deal and call off the tariffs. Trade Minister Dominic LeBlanc was in D.C. yesterday meeting with his U.S. counterpart for the third time in as many weeks. (CBC News)

Gay Lea Foods is betting big on the cottage cheese boom. The Canadian dairy maker is investing over $200 million to expand its manufacturing facility in Toronto — a move that the company says is in direct response to higher demand from protein-maxxing cottage cheese lovers. According to data cited by Gay Lea, almost half of Canadian households now purchase cottage cheese, with consumption jumping 24% over the past year. (Financial Post)

Canada could see the most insolvencies since 2009 this year. Over 37,000 Canadian consumers filed for insolvency last quarter, the highest total since the ‘09 financial crisis — the worst-ever year for insolvencies in Canada. Credit card and mortgage debt have driven the spike, with many Canadians struggling to pay off loans taken on during the 2010s housing price boom. (Globe and Mail)

📡 What else is on our radar: 

Tariffs, inflation, and a sluggish job market: not exactly the ingredients for a thriving upmarket salad chain. And yet, Canadian salad chain Mandy’s is expanding fast, with a loyal customer base that will happily pay up. Become a Peak Premium subscriber to find out how Mandy's Salads turned romaine tossed in garlicky dressing and topped with chicken into an “accessible luxury” made for our times.

🤝 Meet Ajay Agrawal. He is an economist and professor at the University of Toronto's Rotman School of Management, where he founded the science-focused startup incubator Creative Destruction Lab and serves as the Geoffrey Taber Chair in Entrepreneurship and Innovation. An expert in the economics of science, Ajay answered all sorts of questions about AI and labour. 

You've written that AI in itself is not a goal, it's a tool to achieve a goal. What do you think is the biggest mistake organizations make when implementing AI into the workplace?

They don't set a sufficiently ambitious goal. The vast majority, what they do is they take a process the way it is today, and then they figure out what they can do with AI to do it a little more efficiently — like automate some steps to cut some costs — as opposed to asking, “what is something much more ambitious that we could do?”

And so when Prime Minister Carney asked the AI minister [Evan] Solomon to put together a strategy, and then he put together a task force, there were a bunch of people on that task force, and I was one of those people. My recommendation for Canada was to set moonshots. I had one in healthcare, one in defence, one in homelessness, one in natural resources, and one in education, and each one was to set a wildly ambitious goal that you could not do without machine intelligence. And machine intelligence alone wouldn’t solve the problem, but it was a key unlock that along with some other parts of the solution would drive it.

Can you give a specific example of a moonshot?

Many Canadians feel proud of our healthcare system because it's, in theory, universally accessible. Except that many people have to wait so long for treatment that, if they have the means, some leave Canada and go somewhere else for their treatment. And some end up suffering great consequences because of how long they have to wait before they actually get help. So the moonshot in healthcare was to reduce all the waiting times across the board by 90%. And that's the kind of goal where there's no way you could do that without machine intelligence. But you can't just point AI at it —  it requires a number of organizational design changes in addition to the implementation of AI. AI is like an optimizer, and so it can make many things much more efficient, but it can also redesign how we operate things because we have such a powerful prediction tool.

Another interesting concept that you've talked about is the “genius supply shock.” Can you explain what that means and why it's relevant for a modern workforce? 

Imagine that some rich person came along and said, “hey, I am going to donate to The Peak and give you 12 Nobel Prize winners for the next year. They're going to just come in, sit in your office, find computers, and they'll be there from nine-to-five and do whatever you need them to do.” My guess is at least for the first few months, nobody at The Peak would really know what to do with them. And that's what I mean by supply shock, which is all of a sudden, all these companies and organizations get access to this incredible intelligence. And we're not set up to use it. Because we're not used to having it. And so we don't even know what to ask it to do.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity. Read the full Q&A here.

RBC and BMO are pulling off a POS transaction that can’t be settled with a simple tap.

What happened: RBC and BMO are selling Moneris — the point of sale (POS) payments system the two banks co-founded in 2000 — to American PE firm Francisco Partners for $2 billion cash.

Why it’s happening: Moneris is still the dominant payments platform in Canada, handling around a third of transactions — practically unchanged from its market share in the 2010s — across some 325,000 business clients. However, RBC and BMO see the writing on the wall as several new entrants have steadily accumulated customers over the past decade.

Why it matters: For banks to keep their payments services competitive with newer options that often provide faster and more flexible platforms, a revamp is required. It seems that many would rather pass on that opportunity, and the spending that comes with it, to others. 

Our take: Surely much of Moneris’ continued dominance is courtesy of legacy customers who haven’t bothered to switch — back when we swiped instead of tapped, it was the only POS we ever saw. Now, when we go to, say, a new cafe, we’re invariably mulling over the tip option on a Square terminal. It might be a strong play for RBC and BMO to cut and run.—QH

🚙 10%. Reduction in Canadian auto thefts in the first half of the year compared to the same period in 2025. Overall theft numbers are now trending back down to pre-2021 levels, when the car theft crisis started in Canada. Alberta has seen the biggest decline of any province, with 15% fewer thefts in the first half of the year.

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Game on! It’s time for today’s mini-crossword, the daily sudoku, Codebreaker, and Who’s Who.