GM. This is Take Off, the playlist of tech news. We curate the greatest hits, chart-toppers, and hidden gems of the tech world to keep you grooving all day long.

Here's what we're serving up today:

• Apple Wins the “Epic” Battle 💪

• StackOverflow says “Pay Up AI Buddies” 🫰💵

• Snap Users : Thanks but No Th-AI-nks ✋

Apple Wins the “Epic” Battle 💪

Oh boy, the “epic” battle (pun intended) between Apple and Epic Games continues! But Apple's feeling pretty good today, as the court has upheld a previous decision stating Apple isn't a "monopolist under either federal or state antitrust laws."

If you don’t know what this tussle is about, we’ve got ‘ya:

1. This started when Epic Games, feeling a little rebellious, decided to add a direct payment option in their popular game Fortnite on the iPhone, bypassing the App Store and its 30% cut.

2. Epic Games then sued Apple, claiming that the App Store's exclusive payment system was monopolistic, and demanded the right to use their own payment platform.

3. Apple argued that it was just trying to keep its digital playground safe and secure but the court ruled that Apple must allow developers to use external payment platforms but found Apple didn't meet the legal requirements to be considered a monopoly.

However, Apple did disagree with the court's decision to allow developers to direct users to third-party payment options citing concerns over privacy and security (and obviously those juicy 30% commissions, wink wink).

StackOverflow says “Pay Up AI Buddies” 🫰💵

If you’re a developer, tell us honestly how many times a day do you Ctr+C & Ctr+V your error messages and look for the solution on Stack Overflow?

And if you’ve been an adopter of the recent AI tools, chances are you are doing the same thing but now using AI.

Well, Stack Overflow (the website that makes you a 10x engineer) has a problem with this and is joining the "pay up" party!

Yep, they're planning to charge big AI developers like OpenAI and Google for using their programming Q&A treasure trove.

They're taking a leaf out of Reddit's book, which is also demanding compensation for using its data to train ChatGPT-style bots.

These AI developers used to scrape the web for data like it was an all-you-can-eat buffet. But now they might have to cough up some dough.

Neither Stack Overflow nor Reddit have spilled the beans on pricing yet, but they're definitely working on it.

Snap Users : Thanks but No Th-AI-nks ✋

Snapchat’s new "My AI" feature has users up in arms, and they're letting the world know with a deluge of one-star reviews!

The situation's so bad that the average US App Store review plummeted to 1.67 over the past week, with 75% of them being one-star. Ouch!

The main gripe? My AI is pinned to the top of users' Chat feed, and it can't be removed or unpinned. And to make matters worse, you need a Snapchat+ subscription to unpin or remove the chatbot.

Snapchat users have taken to social media to vent their frustration, with many threatening to quit the app altogether.

Others find the AI creepy, as it knows users' locations and uses that info in its responses, even if the location isn't shared on Snap Map. Yikes, not cool!

Maybe all Snapchat needs to do is to give their users Thanos’s Snap to nuke the AI bot for free. What do you think?

☄️ Asteroids ☄️

Experimental artist Grimes is boldly embracing the AI-music era, offering to split 50% royalties for any AI-generated tunes using her voice, but she's drawing the line at "baby murder songs" and "Nazi anthems." 🎶🤖

Britain's tossing £100 million into the AI party for a taskforce to whip up foundation models, making chatbots like ChatGPT even smarter in healthcare and education. 🇬🇧💡

A University of Victoria academic used ChatGPT to write an "excellent" recommendation letter, only to flip it on its head and create an "anti-formulaic" version that scored a student a prestigious Cambridge scholarship. The irony is strong with this one! 🎓🤖

⚒️ ToolBox Tuesdays ⚒️

gnbly : Automate phone calls with AI

Potato : Your investment ideas built with AI

Playtext : Read at the speed of Sound.

The Collect Button : Transform anything on your website into an NFT.

Visla : Create polished videos at scale, instantly and effortlessly

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