The AI doomsday cult recruits social media influencers
I got a great pitch email for Pivot to AI last week: [Mastodon] I am Shriya, reaching out on behalf of Frame Fellowship, a 10-week residential program in San Francisco, US for creators who want to become leading voices on AI and its impact on society. We were following your content and thought you…
I got a great pitch email for Pivot to AI last week: [Mastodon] I am Shriya, reaching out on behalf of Frame Fellowship, a 10-week residential program in San Francisco, US for creators who want to become leading voices on AI and its impact on society. We were following your content and thought you are exactly the kind of voice we built this program for. Me? Huge if true. If you get in, you get: • Travel to San Francisco, with housing and meals covered • A $10,000 stipend • Mentorship from leading creators, researchers and AI experts • Ongoing support to grow your channel That’s quite a deal. Why are they doing this? Who’s paying for all of this? I looked at the Frame Fellowship website — and it’s the AI doomsday crowd. The effective altruists, who think the biggest threat from AI is that it takes over and kills all the humans. [Frame] I’m really doubting Frame Fellowship’s been following my content. Unless “Shriya” is the name of their OpenClaw AI bot. Frame Fellowship’s first programme was in April. The Washington Post attended: [Washington Post, archive] The gathering was held at a sprawling event space popular with a Bay Area community focused on the possibility that superintelligent AI might lead to human extinction — a cause sometimes dubbed AI safety. That community is the effective altruists and that event space was Lighthaven, which is run by Lightcone, who also run the LessWrong website these days. Lightcone CEO Oliver Habryka is the guy who previously declared me Rationalist Movement Enemy Number One! If I’d gone with Frame, I’d have been delighted to pop over and meet Oliver. I’m sure he’s a fine fellow. The Frame programme worked by getting influencers who had nothing to do with AI to suddenly start pumping the AI doomsday: with the mandate that 60 percent of their content during the eight weeks has to be focused on AI’s societal impact, such as workplace automation or the risk of catastrophe. And that’s how romance novel BookTok suddenly goes AI doom. The Frame event featured Jeffrey Ladish, formerly of Anthropic and currently at Palisade Research, where he tries to convince people the chatbot is actually Skynet. Ladish has been funding social media influencers to go AI doom: He is part of a recent drive by some in AI safety to convince the masses that superintelligent AI could spell the end of human civilization, a drive that includes sponsoring social media posts and partnering with influencers such as author and YouTube star Hank Green. Hank Green is a popular science YouTuber who’s been pushing AI doomsday harder and harder for about the past year. The Washington Post article details some of the sponsorships that paid Green to shill for the AI doomsday cult — even as Green says in the article that he thinks AI doomsday is silly. Green has personal experience of AI doom — when it came out last week just how much of his stuff was written with ChatGPT and Claude. [Mashable] Rationalist influencer Aella decided to do an AI doomsday influencer camp of her own. It was called “plzdontkillus”. All one word. Aella got 60 influencers to stay at Lighthaven for a month and they had to release one 15-second video a day. Even the organisers had a number of concerns about the setup: [Transformer] “It’s really hard to run a fellowship that’s not an indoctrination camp,” Fernandez said. “If you don’t try really hard to not make an indoctrination camp, you will on accident.” Well, that’s not foreboding. This was an Aella event, so they put in zero effort to not make an indoctrination camp. The cultist breaching questions started at the application form. It asked, “what’s your take on AI?” and “what kind of content would you want to make?” But then: If you had to have sex with a cow would you rather it be dead or alive? Why? A step up from upside-down tortoises you’re not helping. That question is there so that Aella and her team look edgy and unbounded. Then there were “icebreaker” questions — like telling a whole crowd of people about your sexual history. The further escalation was the “torture potluck”, where attendees were expected to participate in and come up with unpleasant experiences as a bonding mechanism: Just before midnight, a small crowd gathered around someone laid down on an AstroTurf-lined wheelchair ramp. He was the first of shockingly many in line to get waterboarded — one of the most in-demand items on the torture menu. Don’t worry — they reassure us the waterboarding was run safely and was quite popular! Also, the organisers disclaim everything: Fernandez said that organizers “were not aware of any waterboarding and only found out about it afterwards.” Except I’m told the safety guy for the waterboarding was also the safety guy for the rationalist meetup Vibecamp and ran similar waterboardings there. Update: and Plzdontkillus ran the waterboarding again in last month’s programme! [Vice, archive] I’m sure all this has everything to do with AI safety. All this is not just one lone weirdo running tryouts for her cult in some way that’s nothing to do with the rest of the subculture. The event was held at Lighthaven and it was funded by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, the AI doomsday home base of Eliezer Yudkowsky, the guy who started all the AI doomsday stories that the AI bubble companies now use as marketing. Yudkowsky also coined the term “effective altruism”. As the effective altruism movement goes, neither Aella nor her event are fringe in the slightest. And the event also produced some videos about why Skynet was coming for us all. Maybe these guys will get the public to really care about the threat of AI doomsday! Or maybe they won’t. I’m not regretting not getting back to the Frame Fellowship on their offer to join their indoctrination programme. Has your organisation ever sent a promotional email to someone who thinks you all belong in jail? Video — PodcastSource: Pivot to AI — Published — Category: Business