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Apple was hit with a lawsuit in California federal court by a pair of neuroscientists who say that the tech company misused thousands of copyrighted books to train its Apple Intelligence artificial intelligence model. Susana Martinez-Conde and Stephen Macknik, professors at SUNY Downstate Health Sciences University in Brooklyn, New York, told the court in a proposed class action on Thursday that Apple used illegal “shadow libraries” of pirated books to train Apple Intelligence. A separate group of authors sued Apple last month for allegedly misusing their work in AI training. TECH COMPANIES FACING LAWSUITS The lawsuit is one of many high-stakes cases brought by copyright owners such as authors, news outlets, and music labels against tech companies, including OpenAI, Microsoft, and Meta Platforms, over the unauthorized use of their work in AI training. Anthropic agreed to pay $1.5 billion to settle a lawsuit from another group of authors over the training of its AI-powered chatbot Claude in August. Spokespeople for Apple and Martinez-Conde, Macknik, and their attorney did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the new complaint on Friday. Apple Intelligence is a suite of AI-powered features integrated into iOS devices, including the iPhone and iPad. “The day after Apple officially introduced Apple Intelligence, the company gained more than $200 billion in value: ‘the single most lucrative day in the history of the company,'” the lawsuit said. According to the complaint, Apple utilized datasets comprising thousands of pirated books as well as other copyright-infringing materials scraped from the internet to train its AI system. The lawsuit said that the pirated books included Martinez-Conde and Macknik’s “Champions of Illusion: The Science Behind Mind-Boggling Images and Mystifying Brain Puzzles” and “Sleights of Mind: What the Neuroscience of Magic Reveals About Our Everyday Deceptions.” The professors requested an unspecified amount of monetary damages and an order for Apple to stop misusing their copyrighted work. Blake Brittain, Reuters
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Are you human? A new game wants you to prove it. I’m Not a Robot is a fun spin on the popular CAPTCHA game synonymous with using the internet. Except it’s not just one game, but 48 increasingly absurd puzzles designed to help you prove you have a souland the patience to parallel park a Waymo using your arrow keys. The game begins as you’d expect. Level 1 asks you to check a box to prove you’re not a robot. Level 3 prompts you to decipher text wiggling on the screen. But the more you progress, the whackier it all becomes. Level 11 asks you to find Waldo on a crowded beach. Level 17 wants you to use your mouse to draw a circle that is 94% accurate (it’s not as easy as it sounds.) Level 25 lets you play day trader at the stock market, and you must make a minimum of $2,500 by buying and selling stock based on a chart that dips and spikes live on your screen. [Screenshot: Neal Agarwal] Since the game launched in September, it has been played by more than 2.5 million people. The game’s designer, Neal Agarwal, estimates it would take a whole two hours to complete all 48 levels: “That’s how hard it is,” he says. I think less than 1% have completed it. [Screenshot: courtesy of the author] A brief history of CAPTCHA CAPTCHA, which stands for Completely Automated Public Turing Test to Tell Computers and Humans Apart, was first developed in the late 1990s as a way to prevent automated bots from abusing online services. One of the first companies to implement it was the web search engine AltaVista, which used distorted text images that humans could read but computers could not, to stop automated URL submissions to its search engine. [Screenshot: courtesy of the author] Hundreds of thousands of sites have adopted CAPTCHA over the years, including PayPal, Yahoo, and Google, which acquired the technology in 2009. Google then renamed the interface reCAPTCHA and started to show users scanned text from books and newspapers that computers couldn’t recognize, which turned into a digitizing platform as well. [Screenshot: courtesy of the author] Agarwal, who keeps a list of more than 1,600 ideas for game designs, has wanted to design a CAPTCHA game for years, but it was the recent AI boom that really drove the idea home. “All these new AIs are coming out, and they are doing more and more things that traditionally only humans could do,” he says. “So how do you design a test that can only be solved by humans?” According to a report from 2024, the number of bots has now surpassed the number of humans on the internet, accounting for more than half of global internet traffic. These bots flood social media with coordinated disinformation campaigns, manipulate online polls and product reviews, scalp concert tickets within seconds of release, and enable sophisticated fraud schemes that cost businesses billions annually. They also affect the efficacy of CAPTCHA games, which have grown from distorted text that humans had to decipher to increasingly elaborate image puzzles. [Screenshot: courtesy of the author] Who is the internet for? Agarwal has a knack for games tha double as social commentary. His Password Game became a viral phenomenon in 2023, testing, as the site puts, “your password strength, your patience, and your will to live.” The Stimulation Clicker simulates the modern internet’s chaotic environment, bombarding players with overwhelming notifications, breaking news feeds, and various distractions that fragment attention. The Printing Money game made stark income inequality visible by turning hourly rates for various occupations, like a teacher and Fortune 500 CEO, into printing presses that stream dollar bills across the page as theyre earned. I’m Not a Robot is extremely fun to play, but it also highlights, as Agarwal puts it, “the absurdity of how the internet was created for humans and now it’s half robots. Half the people we chat with arent even real, and it’s only going to get even more crazy.” [Screenshot: courtesy of the author] Earning your humanity To make his point, Agarwal designed puzzles for I’m Not a Robot that require an increasing amount of brainpower to solve. One level asks you to break up with your AI girlfriend. Another is a full-on chess game. Another requires you to convince an AI that youre human. The last level is a Dance Dance Revolution game you play with arrow keys. Agarwal says it’s proven very hard for people to solve. [Screenshot: courtesy of the author] I myself am currently stuck on Level 24, which asks you to calculate the value of mathematical functions and sort them from lowest to highest. Considering the presence of logarithms, x’s, and a sigma, it has proven too head-cracking for my writerly brain, but for those who make it through to the end, Agarwal promises a certificate of humanity, and a surprise appearance by CAPTCHA founder Luis von Ahn, who went onto cofound Duolingo. And yes, I could run the math equations through ChatGPTor, god forbid, dig up my high school scientific calculator to advance to Level 25but that would probably defeat the purpose of proving Im human.
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Joel Mokyr, Philippe Aghion, and Peter Howitt won the Nobel memorial prize in economics Monday for their research into the impact of innovation on economic growth and how new technologies replace older ones, a key economic concept known as “creative destruction.”The winners represent contrasting but complementary approaches to economics. Mokyr is an economic historian who delved into long-term trends using historical sources, while Howitt and Aghion relied on mathematics to explain how creative destruction works.Dutch-born Mokyr, 79, is from Northwestern University; Aghion, 69, from the Collge de France and the London School of Economics; and Canadian-born Howitt, 79, from Brown University.Mokyr was still trying to get his morning coffee when he was reached on the phone by an AP reporter, and said he was shocked to win the prize.“People always say this, but in this case I am being truthfulI had no clue that anything like this was going to happen,” he said.His students had asked him about the possibility he would win the Nobel, he said. “I told them that I was more likely to be elected Pope than to win the Nobel Prize in economicsand I am Jewish, by the way.”Mokyr will turn 80 next summer but said he has no plans to retire. “This is the type of job that I dreamed about my entire life,” he said.Like fellow laureate Mokyr, Aghion also expressed surprise at the honor. “I can’t find the words to express what I feel,” he said by phone to the press conference in Stockholm. He said he would invest his prize money in his research laboratory.Asked about current trade wars and protectionism in the world, Aghion said that: “I am not welcoming the protectionist way in the US. That is not good for world growth and innovation.”The winners were credited with better explaining and quantifying “creative destruction,” a key concept in economics that refers to the process in which beneficial new innovations replaceand thus destroyolder technologies and businesses. The concept is usually associated with economist Joseph Schumpeter, who outlined it in his 1942 book “Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy.”The Nobel committee said Mokyr “demonstrated that if innovations are to succeed one another in a self-generating process, we not only need to know that something works, but we also need to have scientific explanations for why.”Mokyr has long been known as an optimist about the positive effects of technological innovation.In an interview with the AP in 2015, he cited the music streaming service Spotify as an example of an “absolutely astonishing” innovation that economists had difficulty measuring. Mokyr noted he once owned more than 1,000 CDs and, before that, “I spent a large amount of my graduate student budget on vinyl records.” But now he could access a huge music library for a small monthly fee.Aghion and Howitt studied the mechanisms behind sustained growth, including in a 1992 article in which they constructed a mathematical model for creative destruction.Aghion helped shape French President Emmanuel Macron’s economic program during his 2017 election campaign. More recently, Aghion co-chaired the Artificial Intelligence Commission, which in 2024 submitted a report to Macron outlining 25 recommendations to position France as a leading force in the field of AI.“The laureates’ work shows that economic growth cannot be taken for granted. We must uphold the mechanisms that underlie creative destruction, so that we do not fall back into stagnation,” said John Hassler, chair of the committee for the prize in economic sciences.One half of the 11 million Swedish kronor (nearly $1.2 million) prize goes to Mokyr and the other half is shared by Aghion and Howitt. Winners also receive an 18-carat gold medal and a diploma.The economics prize is formally known as the Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel. The central bank established it in 1968 as a memorial to Nobel, the 19th-century Swedish businessman and chemist who invented dynamite and established the five Nobel Prizes.Since then, it has been awarded 57 times to a total of 99 laureates. Only three of the winners have been women.Nobel purists stress that the economics prize is technically not a Nobel Prize, but it is always presented together with the others on Dec. 10, the anniversary of Nobel’s death in 1896.Nobel honors were announced last week in medicine, physics, chemistry, literature and peace. Corder reported from The Hague, Netherlands. David McHugh in Frankfurt, Germany, and Chris Rugaber in Washington contributed to this report. Kostya Manenkov and Mike Corder, Associated Press
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