Arthur Holland Michel
Friendly reminders about spooky technologies.
Words in Wired, The Economist, The Atlantic, and others. Author of “Eyes in the Sky”
- The only genuinely funny thing about AI is how companies are always begging us to use it.
- Disturbing is the key word here. I've heard a ton of similar stories. People are developing an almost unconscious impulse to turn to ChatGPT when they face a tricky dilemma.
- It's no coincidence that all the technologies that Daniel lists here are really fun. By robbing us of the joys of connection, togetherness, and spontaneity, AI not only makes makes us less human—it makes life less fun.
- By contrast, anyone who dares to claim that regulation might actually *promote* innovation is sure to be chased right out of town by an angry mob.
- One of the strangest things about the tech discourse is that you can say that regulation stifles innovation, without offering a shred of evidence to that effect, and everyone just accepts that it is absolutely true.
- Opening a significant Senate hearing on AI policy at which Sam Altman will testify, Ted Cruz (R-Texas) calls for a hands-off approach: "To lead in AI, the United States cannot allow regulation, even the supposedly benign kind, to choke innovation." Live: www.commerce.senate.gov/2025/5/winni...
- People of the UK: your medical records have been used to train an AI that will be used to diagnose and predict illness. But at least you'll get better medical care in future as a result, right? Because AI never makes mistakes or hallucinates? Right? Right? www.newscientist.com/article/2479...
- Today in "News that sounds super boring and technical but is actually really important" Google and Microsoft have opened the gates for people to build systems in which the two companies' AI agents can interact and collaborate directly with one another. techcrunch.com/2025/05/07/m...
- If a judge allows AI-generated testimony from a deceased victim, how far are we from seeing AI-generated testimony from a deceased or indisposed witness? Or a defendant, a-la Cadaver Synod? Honestly we're at a point where we can't rule anything out.
- After watching the AI video of the deceased victim, the judge told the family, "I loved that AI, thank you for that. As angry as you are, as justifiably angry as the family is, I heard the forgiveness...I feel that that was genuine.” I am speechless. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
- AI-generated evidence, AI-generated testimony, AI generated legal briefs, AI-generated bar exam questions... It is a very dangerous time to be in court.
- AI is terrible at most things but it's really good for distracting shareholders from the fact that your core business isn't profitable.
- Uber reported first-quarter earnings this morning. Key numbers here. Trips and revenue are up year-over-year but still missed Wall Street analysts' expectations. The company sees driverless vehicles, AV technology, as “the single greatest opportunity ahead for Uber.” www.cnbc.com/2025/05/07/u...
- I bet some cardinals will use AI for the conclave.
- After watching the AI video of the deceased victim, the judge told the family, "I loved that AI, thank you for that. As angry as you are, as justifiably angry as the family is, I heard the forgiveness...I feel that that was genuine.” I am speechless. www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025...
- This is dumb and scary. But what's even scarier is that for every text that readily reveals itself to be written by AI, there are many more that slip under the radar unnoticed.
- Now imagine the fusion of this tech with automated license plate readers.
- Any minute now someone is going to suggest that parents should just get AI to read to their children.
- the fraction of parents reading to their 0-4 year old kids frequently has apparently fallen by 23 POINTS since 2012 www.theguardian.com/books/2025/a...
- And a bunch of people will think, "Yes! Great idea!" and do exactly that, thus denying themselves one of the sweetest, most joyful experiences in life.
- If only there was a simple and reliable technology that blocks sunlight from coming in through airplane windows. aviationa2z.com/index.php/20...
- Horrifying. "In 2023, air pollution attributed to U.S. data centers was responsible for an estimated $6 billion in public health damages." spectrum.ieee.org/data-centers...
- "a dominant air and space force is the absolute key ...We’ve done it over and over ... run these, high tempo, lethal parallel combat ops and just absolutely crush our enemies. You saw it in ... Afghanistan" afa.org/agenda/winni... Hmm.
- 😬
- In other words, they're planning to profit off people's loneliness.
- Mark Zuckerberg says Meta's chatbots will supplement your real friends: "The average American has fewer than 3 friends ... but has demand for ... 15 friends" (h/t x.com/romanhelmetg...)
- Writing is hard Solving a problem is hard Finding the answer is hard Doing research is hard Drawing a picture is hard Making a friend is hard Thinking is hard And that's why we do those things.
- This man has probably done more than any other person on the planet to bring about the loneliness epidemic. And he's not finished yet.
- Mark Zuckerberg says Meta's chatbots will supplement your real friends: "The average American has fewer than 3 friends ... but has demand for ... 15 friends" (h/t x.com/romanhelmetg...)
- "We'll use drones and new tech" Translation: "We don't have a solution to this problem but we want to scare you into thinking that we do"
- It blows my mind that there is still a debate over whether technology is neutral.
- Here's a fun challenge. Name a *single* time that a government or institution adopted AI because of popular demand.
- Did anyone who's not in a position of power actually ask for AI in hospitals, traffic management, housing authorities, welfare departments, warfare, police forces, bar associations...?
- One might also ask: if you can't trust a technology to reliably provide information about—oh I don't know, how to safely make a pizza—why would you trust it with something as high stakes as traffic management.
- Here's the full text of the announcement. Having read it end to end, I still have absolutely no idea how this will work. It is so vague that it's almost comical. www.gov.ca.gov/2025/04/29/g...
- An overlooked and hilarious detail in all these stories of AI being used to write terrible legal briefs and bar exams is that the people using the AI were probably paid way more than it would cost to hire a very competent human to do the same work without committing any errors.
- Flawless logic. Crime prediction technology has never worked in any other city anywhere on the planet, and we have absolutely no reason to believe that it will work here, but we'll give it a try anyway.
- AI is great...at getting lawyers into trouble. arstechnica.com/tech-policy/...
- The first federal anti-deepfake bill is about to be signed into law. So start counting the days until: a) someone uses it to take down legitimate speech, or b) it gets struck down by a judge on First Amendment grounds www.cbsnews.com/news/house-t...
- Instead of recognizing that there's no such thing as a technical fix to AI bias, tech spent a decade trying to brute force the problem with engineering. This did nothing fix the root causes of AI bias and led to gaffes that gave the anti-woke crowd all the pretext they need to scream bloody murder.
- Today we call it "open tabs."
- Tech firms doing “AI welfare research” today reminds me of early drone companies doing drone pizza deliveries even though they knew the tech was nowhere near being ready for it. A publicity stunt that distracted the discourse from very serious, very immediate concerns.
- Think about the number of times serious news publications covered those drone delivery stunts; now think about whether a drone has ever delivered anything to your door at any point in the last dozen years since those stories ran.
- As a tech journalist you need to be very careful about engaging with certain ideas that originate from within tech companies that will profit from the mere fact that you are engaging with those ideas. “AI welfare” is one of those ideas.
- Acknowledging that a technology is harmful but insisting that it's useful is the modern equivalent of "he made the trains run on time."
- Saying "they're useful even though they cause social, economic, and environmental harms" also doesn't really hold water. It's a bit like saying that you understand people burning coal because it can be very useful.
- I think a major problem with the discourse on AI is that those pushing the tech and those resisting it have fundamentally different understandings of what it means for a technology to suck or be useful.
- "Treason doth never prosper...For if it prosper, none dare call it treason." —John Harrington
- Friendly reminder: if your "innovation" results in a huge fail that turns into a national news story...it's not innovation.
- CA Supreme Court tells the State Bar to "innovate" and use AI. State Bar uses AI to write tests. Surprise surprise, the AI sucks. The whole thing blows up in their faces. A story that has been written thousands of times heretofore, and will be written millions of times henceforth.
- Weird to be living in a time when the expression "saying the quiet part out loud" is meaningless because, well, they're all just saying the quiet part out loud.
- Kudos to the "cheat on everything" guy for saying the quiet part out loud.
- AI pushers act as if outsourcing your work to others is a totally new way of getting ahead. In fact, leverage (and exploiting unseen labor) has always been rewarded much more richly than effort. And that's precisely why the world sucks so much right now.
- This is literally an autonomous weapon and therefore three things will definitely happen: The bears are going to figure out a way around it. It's going to accidentally spray something that isn't a bear (a dog, a cow, a child). Someone else will deliberately use this tech against humans.
- Why tho?
- friendly reminder: writing a difficult essay is fun solving a hard problem is fun reading every page is fun getting a tricky email just right is fun brainstorming is fun planning a vacation is fun making a playlist is fun drawing is fun doing things with your own brain is fun
- There is so much that troubles me about how AI is being hawked to replace human contact, but something about using it for elderly companionship just breaks my weary fucking heart.
