Arthur Holland Michel

Here's my new essay "Autonomous Refusal in Lethal Weapons," which examines an overlooked facet of all autonomous weapons, their inherent capacity to "refuse" orders, and explains how this could undermine human compliance with legal and moral obligations in warfare.

www.sdu.dk/-/media/cws/...

Europe’s drone-filled vision for the future of war Eighty years after total war transformed the continent, European countries are making big bets on new instruments of annihilation.

I've been off all screens for a month—glorious, highly recommend—so this is a bit behind, but @technologyreview.com's latest issue has a story of mine on Europe's odd fixation with new instruments of annihilation. Gift link: ter.li/8ma6me

A flirty Meta AI bot invited a retiree to meet. He never made it home. Impaired by a stroke, a man fell for a Meta chatbot originally created with Kendall Jenner. His death spotlights Meta’s AI rules, which let bots tell falsehoods.

Holy hell. An internal Meta AI safety policy document sated that “It is acceptable [for a chatbot] to engage a child in conversations that are romantic or sensual.”

Meta only removed that line (and others like it) after Reuters contacted them for comment.

www.reuters.com/investigates...

Maybe this won’t come as a surprise but this tech is built, in part, on models made by OpenAI (CLIP) and Meta (DINOv2). So there’s that, too.

I’ve spent a decade reminding people that for all their terrible powers of intrusion, drones still can’t recognize your face. Well, they could do so soon.

Drones could soon become more intrusive than ever “Whole-body” biometrics are on their way

In a new note for @economist.com I wrote about an effort to arm drones with a formidable new surveillance power: facial recognition. www.economist.com/science-and-...

Sam Altman now says AGI, or human-level AI, is 'not a super useful term’ — and he's not alone Computer science experts say it's better to focus on the more specialized use cases of AI.

If you still had any doubt that the idea of "AGI" was 100% a marketing ploy, watch as all these guys stop using it now that it's no longer profitable to do so.

www.cnbc.com/2025/08/11/s...

Someone needs to make a manual on the do's and don'ts of writing about predictive policing.

eg. never say something like "spot future killers." There's no such thing as a future killer.

"at a disadvantage" is an awfully strange way of saying "happy and free."

Imagine if a college in 2010 announced that it was going to accept the reality that a bunch of its students were paying people from Craigslist to write their essays.

The new definition of insanity is training a chatbot on the whole of the Internet and expecting it not to repeat the Web's ugly biases.

sports🤝surveillance

www.theatlantic.com/technology/a...

Does AI make you more stupid? Creativity and critical thinking might take a hit. But there are ways to soften the blow

Creativity and critical thinking might take a hit. But there are ways to soften the blow

Does AI make you stupid? Creativity and critical thinking might take a hit. But there are ways to soften the blow

For this week's @economist.com I investigate how heavy AI use can degrade our cognitive abilities. The science on this question is still very new. But the evidence so far is troubling, to put it mildly.

www.economist.com/science-and-...

I'm trying to imagine what we would have thought in 2016 if the DoD had given Microsoft $200 million for Tay, the chatbot that went full bigot on Twitter within hours of being launched, a mere week after the debacle. Our heads would have exploded.

The Media's Pivot to AI Is Not Real and Not Going to Work AI is not going to save media companies, and forcing journalists to use AI is not a business model.

Media outlets can't pivot to AI to save themselves. It's not a business strategy and it's not going to work. The only path forward is for journalists to lean into their humanity, to do things AI can't, and to make clear they are writing for people, not algorithms:

www.404media.co/the-medias-p...

An AI-generated band got 1m plays on Spotify. Now music insiders say listeners should be warned The Velvet Sundown released two albums before admitting their music, images and backstory were created by AI

Someone should tell the people who did this that making music with your own hands and voice is way more fun.

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

An AI-generated band got 1m plays on Spotify. Now music insiders say listeners should be warned The Velvet Sundown released two albums before admitting their music, images and backstory were created by AI

A lot of fans say they're not as good live.

www.theguardian.com/technology/2...

Friendly reminder that there's no point talking about using a technology "for good" if you don't let people talk about how it's also being used for bad.

Those who predicted the AI revolution decades ago were right about a lot of things but they never counted on just how racist a lot of these machines would turn out to be

If you're wondering why people who work on AI ethics look a little tired, maybe it's because they've spent a decade watching AI do really racist stuff. They can be forgiven for being a bit grumpy.

My takeaway from the Grok white genocide debacle is that it has been nine years since Microsoft Tay and tech companies still have zero idea how to get their chatbots say what they want them to say.

I find this a little hard to believe. Unless by "serious defense officials" the author means people with very limited understanding of where the tech was at the time and the extremely limited ways it was, at that time, being used.

It’s dangerous for LLMs to generate terms such as “I understand your point,” “my intention was” and “I apologize.” None of these words represent the actual reason the system did what it did.

Top Google exec says AI will rival humans in just 5 years and predicts we’ll 'colonize the galaxy' in 2030—but he draws the line at robot nurses 2030 will be “an era of maximum human flourishing, where we travel to the stars and colonize the galaxy,” Google DeepMind CEO says. Bill Gates and Marc Benioff have shared similar predictions.

The point of declarations like these is not to inform you. Nor does it reflect specific knowledge. The point is to provoke/inspire/outrage/entertain. Which is fine. People are allowed to make content. Just remember that good policy is built on expertise, not content.

fortune.com/2025/06/06/g...

Friendly reminder that 99.999% of what tech leaders say about AI is not expertise. It's content.

DIU Launches Project GI To Select First-Person Vehicle Drones | Aviation Week Network A new acquisition channel has opened to introduce first-person vehicle (FPV) drones and UAS for other domains into the U.S. military inventory.

The DoD is starting to get into FPV drones. They're only about fifteen years behind hobbyist drone racers, and three years behind the Ukrainians.

aviationweek.com/defense/airc...

On a podcast five years ago I was asked if I'm more afraid of killer robots or sex robots. I said sex robots. This is precisely why.

Edible AI slop.