Micah Voraritskul

Is VerifiedHuman For You? I have been building VerifiedHuman since April 2023. I can explain the mechanics—the certification process, the badge, the community spanning 25+ countries on 6 continents. But until yesterday, I stumbled to answer the simplest question: Why should anyone care?open.substack.com/pub/verifiedhu…

TODAY. 4:00 PM. 🚨 Cleveland/Bradley County Public Library 📚 "AI for the Rest of Us." 🤖 Bring your questions — it's a conversation, not a lecture. 💬 See you there, Cleveland! 👋

Contentment is not a DESTINATION. Contentment is a PRACTICE. It has taken me a long time to get that.

I made my wife a mixtape in Cambridge, England. We've been married a long time now. I was studying in Cambridge. She was back in the States. I spent an entire afternoon in my room with a dual-deck cassette player, recording songs from CDs I'd borrowed and handwriting the tracklist on the insert. Then I mailed it — physically. Thousands of miles measured in days, not milliseconds. AI can generate a playlist in two seconds. It can analyze her listening history, cross-reference mood data, and assemble something algorithmically optimized for her exact taste profile. But it can't hold a candle to that tape. The effort was the point. The time it took was the point. The fact that I sat there, choosing each song, thinking about her as I did, was what made it matter. Not the track selection (though it was stellar). Definitely not the audio quality. But the presence. Effort is a kind of love. What we make by hand carries something a prompt never will. I wrote a whole book about this — *Human Is the New Vinyl* -- link in comments.

Recording my own audiobook was terrifying. I'm not a trained narrator. Since it's about the value of being authentically human, I couldn't bear to ask someone else. The stumbles, the tilt, the rhythm: It's all me. That's the book. a.co/d/05NOHOnl #VerifiedHuman #HumanIstheNewVinyl

How quickly work at scale makes "good enough" the new standard. Gross. Nobody voted on it. Nobody said, "Hey, let's race to the bottom." It just happened in 24 months. Blast away, slop cannons. We've forgotten that better used to be an option. Actually, who cares? It's just bots reading what other bots write anyway. Humans used to BE the audience. Now they've left the building and are just roaming around, disoriented. #SlopCannons #HumanIsTheNewVinyl

@LinusEkenstam Thx @LinusEkenstam - i have been writing about this since 2023! Here it is. What I’ve called the differentiation problem – – and the SAG aftra/wga strikes were just a very early glace - railing against an upcoming tsunami 100 times larger.

The only sane person in Hollywood right now talking some real talk.

The beauty and tragedy of AI. The beauty: Medicine. Protein mapping. Epidemiology. Safer cars. Faster diagnoses. Life-saving, life-changing. The tragedy: everything else. The parts where AI quietly strips away our humanity: our creativity, our voice, our agency, our chance to be the ones who make things. The beauty is moving fast. The tragedy, faster. #VerifiedHuman

When Deep Blue beat Garry Kasparov in 1997, my heart died a little. When AlphaGo beat Lee Sedol in 2016, the world's heart died a little more. The machines we made were encroaching on our sacred spaces. It's more than chess now. It's all of life. #HumanIsTheNewVinyl #HumanCreativity #SacredSpaces

Don't go gently. #VerifiedHuman #PeopleWin

VO Atlanta is the world's largest and longest-running voiceover conference. This year, I'm addressing the question the entire VO industry is asking: AI Can Copy Your Voice. It Can't Copy You. Synthetic voices are getting better every week. But the voice actors, creators, and storytellers in the room aren't worried about being replaced by better technology. They're asking a harder question: what makes *human* worth choosing when *machine* = cheaper + faster? The answer is clearer than most people realize. 📍 VO Atlanta — Ogeechee Room 🗓 Saturday, March 28 | 1:00–1:50 PM 🔗 voatlanta.me

A song from the Boss FOR OUR TROUBLED TIMES: Bruce Springsteen - Streets Of Minneapolis (Official Lyric Video) youtu.be/GDaPdpwA4Iw?si… via @YouTube

Education in its purest form has never been about the mere transfer of information. It has been about forming decent humans who can think, cooperate, and add value to the world. Tools that optimize for speed and frictionless "learning" are forcing us to decide whether that still matters. #VerifiedHuman #HumanIsTheNewVinyl #TeachHuman #ProHuman

I had a 20-year pen-pal friendship with Walter Hooper — Lewis's last private secretary. Visited him twice, once for a weekend in Oxford, once at Lewis's dedication at Westminster Abbey. Hooper was like an uncle and he told me stories about "Jack's" last days I've never heard anywhere else. This piece brought them all back!

C. S. Lewis's ideal daily routine themarginalian.org/2014/08/14/c-s…

AI just ATE the SaaS industry for breakfast. (Nom. Nom.) Anthropic dropped legal automation tools Tuesday. Claude Code is turning solo devs into entire teams. The subscription model for the last 40 years just got its expiration date. Software sector ⬇ 28%. Oracle ⬇ 60%. Palantir ⬇ 36%. Nasdaq ⬇ $1.5 trillion in THREE DAYS!!! Salesforce, Adobe, ServiceNow, Thomson Reuters — all getting thrashed. Market correction? NOPE. B/c of tariffs? NOPE.... Displacement.

Photobooths. Vinyl. Broadway. Live tours. When copies are infinite, the physical becomes premium. When outputs are perfect, the real becomes valuable. Human is the new vinyl. 📸 Casey Templeton

My dad and I bought the same phone case. Exact same red case, same sticky wallet on the back. We didn't plan it -- just happened. We were both amazed. Chai Voraritskul graduated from Howard University and became a research chemist, a problem solver by training, a generalist by nature and the kind of person who could talk about anything because he was curious about everything. I didn't realize how much of that I inherited until I got older. The pull toward problems without simple answers. The instinct to connect dots across different fields. To make analogies. The restlessness with doing just one thing. Now I watch my son, Ethan, and see the same wiring! I lost two dads in 2025 — Chai and my stepdad, David Depew, who I'll write about separately. This one's for Chai. For the things that get passed down without anyone deciding anything. The grace of legacy is that it simply happens. It doesn't ask permission.

Tennessee's ELVIS Act protects voice and likeness. California's AB-2602 protects performers. Both just got a target on their backs from EO 14365. Federal wants light touch. States want creator protection. Guess who wins? #CreatorProtection #AIPolicy #VerifiedHuman

Tennessee's ELVIS Act protects voice and likeness. California's AB-2602 protects performers. Both just got a target on their backs from EO 14365. Federal wants light touch. States want creator protection. Guess who wins? #CreatorProtection

@timnitGebru Preach.

This Wikipedia page is the most ridiculous thing I've read in a while. The amount of hype and misinformation is ridiculous. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moltbook

States’ rights matter. While feds push EO 14365 to squash “onerous” state AI laws, creative industries—writers, artists, musicians, voice actors—& educators need targeted protections from deepfakes & disruption. Let states experiment before D.C. steamrolls. #AIethics #StatesRights