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Barack Obama helped Marc Maron lock the gates on his podcast Monday, returning to the show for the final episode after 16 years and more than 1,600 episodes.The former president gave new status to “WTF With Marc Maron” and to podcasts in general when he visited Maron’s Los Angeles garage studio while still in office a decade ago. Obama brought the 62-year-old host, stand-up comic and actor to his Washington office for the last interview.Obama asked the initial questions.“How are you feeling about this whole thing?,” he said, “transition, moving on from this thing that has been one of the defining parts of your career and your life?”“I feel OK,” Maron answered. “I feel like I’m sort of ready for the break, but there is sort of a fear there, of what do I do now? I’m busy. But, not unlike your job I’ve got a lot of people who over the last 16 years have grown to rely on me.”Maron laughed as he acknowledged he was comparing his podcasting gig to the presidency.“I think it’s pretty similar,” Obama said.The identity of the guest was not revealed until the episode dropped, and fans had been speculating. Obama was a popular guess, both because of his relationship with “WTF” and because Maron in an interview with Variety in July said Obama would be his ideal final conversation.The host explained the decision in an unusually brief and straightforward introduction to the episode.“It became clear that the guest we needed to have was singular,” Maron said, “in that he could address the importance of this being our final episode, but also address how we move through the world we’re living in, as frightening as it is.”Maron asked Obama for advice on moving on from your life’s biggest job.“You’ve still got a couple of chapters left,” Obama said. “Don’t rush into what the next thing is. Take a beat. Take some satisfaction looking backwards.”After a much talk on the state of the world, Obama brought it back around to Maron’s farewell.“I think we’re going to be OK,” Obama said. “I think part of the reason you had such a big fan base during this 16-year run is there was a core decency to you and the conversations that you had.”Maron avoided sentimental farewell talk during the episode he got that out of the way on Thursday in his penultimate episode, where talked directly and emotionally to his listeners.“I’m grateful to have been part of your lives,” he said. “We’ve been through a lot of stuff together. A lot of breakups. Death. Cats. The world.”The new Obama episode was No. 1,686 of the pioneering and influential long-form interview podcast that had humble beginnings in 2009 as a place where he worked out his issues with other stand-up comedians in the garage of his home that he dubbed “The Cat Ranch.”Maron’s cats were always an essential part of the show. His final words on Monday’s episode were tributes to the ones who had died.“Cat angels everywhere,” he said.For most of its years the show has opened with a fan-composed rock ‘n’ roll theme song that opens with an audio sample of Maron in his small role in the film “Almost Famous” shouting, “Lock the gates!” The song is named for one of Maron’s common phrases, “Are We Doing This?” Another such phrase, “Are we good?” was often his last question to guests and is the title of a new documentary on him.Eventually, with help from guests like Obama, Robin Williams and Paul McCartney, “WTF” became a media institution where authors, artists, musicians, Hollywood stars and political leaders would give him their backstory.Maron announced in June that he and longtime producing partner Brendan McDonald had decided to end the show. He said there was no particular reason, other than that he was tired and utterly satisfied with the work they had done.On Monday, Maron seemed moved as he read from a pseudolegal document that he had drawn up for Obama to sign, releasing McDonald “from the professional responsibility to listening to me talk.” Andrew Dalton, AP Entertainment Writer
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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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