Ashwin Verghese

🎥WATCH: Fairplay Board Member @BernsteinGaia will discuss her new policy brief, “From bans to recalls: A public health framework for AI companion bots,” on @BrookingsInst's live panel! ⌚️Today | 11 am ET 🔗 Click below! brookings.edu/events/ai-comp…

Please stop. I don’t want an AI summary of my Google search. I don’t want an AI summary of the text message from my friend at work. I don’t want an AI summary of the email I’m about to read. Please just stop.

@Uchimamalul This is a very lyrical noir

Hollywood films would get a lot better if they relearn how to block long takes like Jacques Tourneur

Clarence B. Jones, lawyer and speechwriter who drafted part of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr's “I Have a Dream” speech, has died nytimes.com/2026/05/25/us/…

Technology is not neutral. It's your choices that show what it is. "In the abstract, technology in and of itself is not a solution to humanity's problems, just as it is not inherently evil. In practice, however, technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it."

We already knew Tolkien would have despised — to his very core — these techno-fascist losers who idolize him. Having the literal Pope rub that fact in their faces? Perfection.

Libraries are the real data centers, and they don't gobble up water and electricity.

Pope Leo XIV in his first encyclical citing Hannah Arendt's Origins of Totalitarianism to warn AI risks producing the exact condition Arendt identified as the prerequisite for totalitarian domination by destroying people's ability to discern between fact and fiction.

Baller move of the Pope to quote JRR Tolkien who warned of the corrupting influence of power in the context of AI. Peter Thiel appropriated Tolkien’s name of the telepathic, all-seeing eye “Palantir” for the name of his AI company

A capitalist take (from this Wharton grad) of "Magnifica Humanitas." Pope Leo XIV’s superb new encyclical is the most cogent Catholic critique of capitalism that I have ever read. americamagazine.org/faith-and-reas…

The Pope isn't anti-AI, he's pro-human open.substack.com/pub/charlottea…

The Pope has weighed in: AI isn't magic. It is produced by a currently deeply exploitative, extractive supply chain. It challenges human dignity; it could fuel a new colonialism. And among the greatest challenges of our time will be to redirect its path of development.

Whoever invents an AI blocker is going to create one of the biggest inventions of our time, and I’m ready to pay for it.

BREAKING: Pope Leo XIV published his landmark encyclical on artificial intelligence "Magnifica Humanitas,” comparing the attempt to build an AI future that excludes God to the "Tower of Babel" and underlining the need to safeguard human dignity as it is "threatened by new forms of dehumanization." "The risk of dehumanization -- of building a future that excludes God and reduces the other to a means -- is an ancient and ever-new temptation that today takes on a technical guise," Pope Leo said. "In the era of artificial intelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human. We must lovingly safeguard the grandeur of humanity bestowed upon us and revealed in its fullness in Christ, the splendor of which no machine can ever replace.”

Humanity, created by God in all its grandeur, is today facing a pivotal choice: either to construct a new Tower of Babel or to build the city in which God and humanity dwell together. In Jesus Christ, this humanity in its grandeur becomes the Way, the Truth and the Life, opening the path for each of us to grow toward fullness. #MagnificaHumanitas vatican.va/content/leo-xi…

@MikeVanderbilt Thanks!

@AshwinFairplay CONGO (1995)

“False sophisticates will scorn it. Real sophisticates will relish it.” -Roger Ebert

JUST IN: Vatican releases Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on safeguarding the human person in the time of AI. vatican.va/content/leo-xi… On Transhumanism and Posthumanism, Pope Leo XIV writes: “If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable or less worthy. In the name of progress, ‘necessary sacrifices’ may begin to be justified, placing the burden on the most vulnerable in pursuit of a supposed optimization of the species. … For this reason, a clear distinction must be made. It is one thing to integrate technology within a human-centered, relational vision; it is quite another to be guided by an outlook that devalues human limits and promises a purely technical form of ‘salvation.’” Read the encyclical here: vatican.va/content/leo-xi…

BREAKING: Pope Leo XIV makes historic apology for Holy See's own role in legitimizing slavery and for failing to condemn it for centuries. apnews.com/article/pope-a…

Harvey Shapiro

Every single pro-AI argument in the creative world basically boils down to “Please respect me for being a lazy hack.”