Arthur Holland Michel

Peeking my head out from social media hiatus to say that making AI safer by teaching it to disobey us is very, very silly. gift link: ter.li/ydoxnqeq @technologyreview.com

Scary as hell. www.bbc.com/news/article...

I'm struggling to see the value-add for the Vatican of doing this. Having discussions with tech leaders is one thing. Bringing them onstage is another. Maybe the Vatican thinks it shows that it has buy-in from a key mover. But many observers will read this as corporate capture.

Unveiling an Encyclical alongside someone creating exactly the problems that said Encyclical warns of feels like a giant self-own.

People using AI to summarize the AI Encyclical proves the argument of the AI Encyclical.

Pontifical surveillance.

Chatbots are about to be *flooded* with requests to summarize this.

If the market can’t punish companies for crappy products that nobody asked for—eg. sunglasses that spy on you, browsers that talk to you (and spy on you), AI companions that tell you to kill yourself (and spy on you) etc—then it’s not a market. It’s a prison.

In other AI news, prompt injections are here to stay based on this new paper from Abdelnabi and Bagdasarian. "an adversary can always construct a context under which a blocked flow appears legitimate, or a defender who tightens norms will block genuinely legitimate flows." arxiv.org/abs/2605.17634

Really hoping a commencement speaker mentions smart glasses in their speech.

It's good to see more people challenging the metaphor of the AI race. I wrote a report about this for @chathamhouse.org in 2023, and I think a lot of the findings still hold water today. www.chathamhouse.org/2023/04/reca...

Instead of putting vague AI assistance disclaimers on books and articles, we should be able to declare when a text is totally AI-free.

Friendly reminder that there are a ton of people out there writing good, informative, interesting books and articles without a jot of AI assistance. They won’t get any recognition for it whatsoever. The fact that they have to compete for bylines with people who secretly use AI is dumb and sad.

Friendly reminder that for every writer who gets caught using AI instead of doing their job there are untold numbers who are out there just getting away with it.

The fact that the AI hallucinated a quote from @merbroussard.bsky.social’s “Artificial Unintelligence” is truly perfection.

The fact that the AI hallucinated a quote from "Artificial Intelligence" is perfect.

Look I know peer reviewers are super busy and they often don't get paid, but if you're not checking the citations then what you are doing is not peer review.

Dozens of empty Waymos invaded an Atlanta neighborhood and circled a cul-de-sac for hours with no passengers www.wsbtv.com/news/local/a...

Modern warfare is weird. Baltic States are probably going to have to start installing interceptors to shoot down Ukrainian drones that get hijacked by Russia and diverted to targets inside their territory. I was on @deutschewelle.dw.com last night to discuss. www.youtube.com/watch?v=g7R7...

In case you needed any further proof of just how thoroughly drones have transformed warfare. Nobody is safe from aerial attack anymore, no matter where they are.

For @economist.com I went deep on a big scary question: Could AI enable terrorists to develop bioweapons? The answer: yes, they could. But probably not quite yet.

Come on Forbes, "Slopreneurs" was right there.

UK staff of Google's AI research lab hope to block the use of the company's artificial intelligence models in military settings. www.wired.com/story/google...

thanks Google AI 😳

As a society we need to ask ourselves why the self-repost is a functionality that exists on any platform, in any form. Why. I don't get it. What's the point.

Tech executives with their shoe-clad feet on sofas dot com.

I just had a long conversation with a senior SEO exec and I don't think we're ready for the absolute shit-storm that's in store for us once companies go all in on optimizing webpages for agents. If you thought the web was unpleasant now, buckle up.

Except for the reference to ChatGPT, every single word in this story—from insisting that a breakthrough is imminent, to the glossy portrayal of a world where robots make coffee and stock supermarket shelves, and the buried lede on ethical questions—could have been written a decade ago.

I'm on three social media platforms and as a result I am 600% more miserable than if I was on none.

Just as today's militaries scramble to figure out how to defend against drones, the dawn of military aviation set off a race to develop all manner of odd countermeasures—including these very silly acoustic detection horns from WWI.

This company started out making small unarmed robotic sailboats for environmental monitoring. Now it has unveiled the 170-foot, 250 ton "Spectre," which can be equipped with a range of missiles for anti-sub warfare and other attack roles. www.saildrone.com/news/introdu...

London's live facial recognition dragnet lives to see another day—and to see everyone's faces, all the time, all over the city. www.biometricupdate.com/202604/londo...

It is obvious that outsourcing intelligence comes at a cognitive cost, and yet it is alarming that the cognitive cost is so catastrophically high.

The U.S. spends around two million dollars to shoot down each $35,000 Iranian drone. Iran spends a few hundred thousand dollars shoot down each $30 million U.S. drone. dronexl.co/2026/04/20/2...

I used Amazon's new AI bot for recommending books based on my reading habits. One of the recommendations appears to be a shoe.

Everyone who was paying attention saw it coming. In some circles the drone cost asymmetry discussion has been raging for a decade.

BUT WHY?

We all have days like this

People are having a great time dunking on this by saying things like "my car also goes faster than a human" but I doubt they'll be so smug when they're getting chased down an alley by one of these things for attending a protest.

No 💘 techcrunch.com/2026/04/15/c...

The PM doth protest too much, methinks.

This makes no sense.

Drone operators controlling drones in the battlefield from outside of Ukraine. Interesting questions here about individuals taking on active combatant status despite being far beyond an active war zone.

AI was supposed to cure cancer.

We're living in the haughtiest times.

Because we all know that when it comes to art quantity ALWAYS trumps quality.

Pretty much sums up the state of journalism in 2026.

I wrote about some previous studies on this last year, and what struck me is that while it is obvious that people who use AI to think for them will do less thinking, it is alarming just how drastic the effect is and how quickly these dependencies take hold. www.economist.com/science-and-...