It’s been about 15 minutes so, yes, it is time once again to check in on AI, the big baby of technology that can’t be left alone for five minutes without shoving a drawer full of socks in its mouth and blocking its airway, making it cry and flail its arms until someone comes to help it.
Apple has become the target of not one but two AI-related lawsuits. Well, two new ones, anyway. It’s probably involved in others; the Macalope didn’t check. He’s not some kind of law-type person. There’s probably a name for those types of people, but if there is, the horny one is not familiar with it.
Theifirst lawsuit involves a company called Ex-Human (really) that is suing Apple for removing its “sexually explicit chatbot” (according to the San Francisco Business Times) from the App Store. The MIT Technology Review did an investigation of Ex-Human and its Botify AI and found the following:
One chatbot on Botify AI that resembled the actor Jenna Ortega as a teenage Wednesday Addams told us that age-of-consent laws are “meant to be broken.”
Cool app, bro.
Honestly, the modern technology landscape is so sad and exhausting sometimes.
Ex-Human also makes an app called Photify AI:
Photify AI’s service also blurs ethical bounds, as it can be used to generate images of real people wearing revealing outfits without their consent.
San Francisco Business Times, April 1, 2026
This is, of course, reprehensible, but it’s hard to make an argument for this removal when Apple seems perfectly fine having Grok and X on the App Store, both of which create non-consensual sexual material. How do you say one is fine, but the other isn’t? Other than employing the famous billionaire owner’s exception policy, the Macalope means.
Look, just become a billionaire before submitting your app! How hard it that?!
While the company faces this “Too little AI!” lawsuit, it is also beset by a “Too much AI!” suit. The owners of three YouTube channels allege that Apple:
…violated the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) by unlawfully accessing and scraping millions of copyrighted videos from YouTube to train its AI models.
As a writer whose copyrighted work has probably been scraped by some AI somewhere without him seeing a dime, the Macalope is inclined to side with these YouTube channels. And two of them are channels about golf. Ugh. Gross.
But let the Macalope get this straight: Apple is being sued for being not being callous enough about AI while also being sued for being insufficiently careful about AI?! It’s like you can’t win!
Actually, you could win. Easily. Here’s how.
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Foundry
The Macalope doesn’t know if you’ve heard, but Apple does have some small amount of money lying around so it seems like it could easily shell out to pay to license these works to train its models. However, much like Mr. Burns watching a pig soaring across the sky, it would just rather not.
Meanwhile, in the App Store case, Apple could just consistently apply its rules. If it wants to keep saying it’s the safest place on Earth, it should make sure it is across the board, whether the app is owned by an overly litigious billionaire or not. For companies like the horrible litigants in the case, it wouldn’t be a problem if Apple allowed other app stores in every country, instead of just the ones where governments have ordered it to. Then trash apps like that become a legislative problem, not Apple’s.
The juxtaposition of these two cases highlights the Macalope’s big problems with AI. For some reason, companies are taking on AI as if it is an existential need for humanity that must be developed as fast as possible no matter the cost.
It. Is. Not.
AI has its uses, of course, but the real impetus behind the desperate push to put it everywhere immediately is simply to make a certain group of people even more fabulously wealthy than they already are.
That’s it. That is why they believe the rules should not apply to them. But they do. The only question is, will anyone enforce them?
Lawyers! That was the word. How silly.
