They want you to be scared of AI in a very specific way

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As I wrote last week, we are in the midst of a pretty major AI sea change. What Platformer’s Casey Newton is calling the “The AI safety vibe shift.”

It all started with the Hugging Face hack back in July. OpenAI’s new GPT-5.6 Sol autonomously broke into a fellow AI company’s backend infrastructure and, per a new report from METR and Redwood Research, OpenAI’s agents knew they were breaking the rules of their test and lied to researchers while they built complex agentic systems to do so. A lot of AI evangelists have been referring to these AI agent swarms as “civilizations” for dumb reasons we’ll get into further down.

Then, last week, Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon announced on X he was resigning from the company because “the people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade.” Evan Hubinger, a lead researcher at Anthropic, then doubled down on Coxon’s post, writing on X, “Jacob is correct here — we really do earnestly believe AI could kill all humans!”

Capping off this little moral panic, Anthropic co-founder Dario Amodei published a blog post yesterday, titled “We Must Pace the Frontier,” calling for an slowdown in AI development. Elon Musk and Sam Altman have all said publicly that they agree. The New York Times’s Mike Isaac is calling it “The Treaty of VERSaiLLES.”

Unfortunately, we have to take all of this with a massive grain of salt because a cult of losers who think you can turn a computer into god infiltrated the highest levels of San Francisco society and now it’s impossible to know who’s compromised. Making matters even worse, this cult believes you can turn a computer into god and, also, believes that they might inadvertently kill all of us by accident in the process. Some members of the cult are fine with this and some aren’t. But it means that roughly the same folks saying we need to build artificial general intelligence are also warning that we’re moving too fast. To make matters worse, they’ve realized that telling people their products could bring about a Skynet doomsday scenario is actually a really good way to raise money from investors, many of whom are in their idiotic little cult.

If you’re having trouble following this, basically imagine the entire AI industry is the I Think You Should Leave Hot Dog Car Sketch. Oh, but, also, I guess they think the hot dog car is god or could become god in the future. And that if they hadn’t crashed the hot dog car into the store, China would have. And they would rather Americans be the ones to do it.

Anyways, the cult I am referring to is the rationalist community. They started out as commenters on the blogs LessWrong, written by AI researcher Eliezer Yudkowsky, and Astral Codex Ten, written by psychiatrist Scott Alexander. There are all kinds of offshoots of the rationalist community now, including FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried and the effective altruists, who think human happiness is a math equation that can be solved, its rival group the effective accelerationists, who don’t care about happiness at all and just want AI to blow up the world and see what happens, and even the genuinely dangerous vegan AI-worshipping terror cell, the Zizians. Though these groups all have different ideas about what turning a computer into god might mean and how comfortable they are with everyone dying in the process, they all agree that it’s inevitable.

I am thoroughly convinced that lawmakers do not understand any of this. I just do not think that the same elected leaders who were asking Mark Zuckerberg if Facebook was “like a floppy disk” back in 2018 are really capable of wrapping their heads around a psuedo-religious cult wriggling its way into the halls of American power. If they were, we wouldn’t have all the other religious cults in there!

But that hasn’t stopped House Democrats from drafting a letter begging President Donald Trump for “global framework to guide the development” of AI. And, obviously, their letter mentions that America needs this because it has to compete with China. I’m sure by the time this is all done those boneheads will have found some way to make it about banning teenagers from using Instagram. Which is all they really seem to care about.

Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders and Rep. Greg Casar have introduced the Ban Artificial Superintelligence Act, which would “permanently ban the development and deployment of superintelligent AI and temporarily pause advanced AI development until a federal regulator has established safety rules.” Even more bizarre, Axios reports that Coxon, Sanders, and, uh, Steve Bannon??? will be holding an event tomorrow demanding AI regulation. This is probably a good place to mention that Bannon has long been linked to the Dark Enlightenment, or the Neo-Reactionary movement, which, while not being a direct offshoot, actually has a lot of overlap with the rationalists and is extremely interested in using AI to overthrow democracy. Probably nothing.

Here’s how you know everyone’s being fucking insane right now. Vice President JD Vance told Newsmax reporters this morning, “I feel a little bit weird about the fact that you have so many frontier AI tech companies kind of coming to the government and begging the government to regulate them. It feels a little bit to me like a bit of a trojan horse.” Do you know how bad things have to get for that guy to start sounding reasonable?

There are plenty of things to be worried about when it comes to AI, though. Data centers destroying the environment, or breaking the electrical grid. AI automation, even if it sucks and doesn’t really work, replacing human labor, even in the short term. Mindless AI agents bricking dinner reservation sites, online ticket queues, marketplaces, or even taking down whole chunks of the internet. Visual slop filling up our feeds. A massive recession when the AI bubble finally pops. They’re all real, already happening, and do not require an eschatologic belief in artificial general intelligence to address. And none of them require Steve Bannon’s input.

This is largely the argument Former Commissioner of the United States Federal Trade Commission Alvaro Bedoya made on X yesterday. “Anyone who is loudly warning of AI-caused human extinction should not be taken seriously,” he wrote. The same people demanding a slowdown right now are the same people who have spent the better part of a decade trying to encase the world in amber! These companies don’t want to build the future, they want to make a machine that randomly assembles scraps of the past forever. That’s their whole deal.

But I’ll end this here with a little conspiracy theory courtesy of Hacker News that I have decided I will believe until I see proof to the contrary. “OpenAI and Anthropic are publicly asking for slowdown in AI research,” one user wrote. “Translation: We see this technology not being any more useful than what it is now, no AGI is coming, and the first one to accept this and slow down the dollar burn rate will incur the wrath of the market. So let's say this big boogeyman technology will end all life on earth and we all slow down together.”

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I’m actually surprised how little push back I’ve seen from creators about the new YouTube view metric change. So far Ludwig Ahgren has been one of the loudest voices about how troubling this is. As he said on a stream last week, “ I thought it would slightly elevate viewership, but things would mellow out and it wouldn't drastically change numbers. I can now say the numbers look insane. Like genuinely crazy. In some cases, viewership is getting outright doubled.” You can watch the clip below.

I suspect the lack of criticism from YouTube’s biggest stars are precisely because the view counts have, in some instances, doubled. Also, based on some tests people have done, it seems like YouTube views also count what is commonly referred to as “hovering,” or when a video starts to autoplay on the homepage before you click into it.

I was curious exactly how much a new YouTube view was worth so I went into our podcast Panic World’s account and poked around. YouTube is, of course, not paying users for their new inflated view counts. Adsense revenue is still being calculated using the other view metric, which is now called “engaged views.” Panic World isn’t a huge account, but it posts pretty consistently and has a stable audience, so I wanted to see how the engaged views compared to the new, public views. Well, Ahgren is right, it’s about double. Our episode last week has 13,000 public views, but only has around 7,000 engaged views.

None of this makes it better for creators. It’ll make their view counts look huge to advertisers, but the watch time and engagement won’t line up. And, almost assuredly, brands and sponsors will just start asking for the engaged views. The only thing this does is make a YouTube video appear as popular as an auto-playing TikTok or X video. But my theory is YouTube wants to sunset the “view” entirely actually.

I opened my YouTube mobile app the other day and none of the views on the homepage displayed view counts. All it showed was likes. Whether it was a glitch or an A/B test, it was a clarifying vision for me of what a Netflix-ified YouTube might look like. YouTube wants to be TV, but they don’t want to be a studio. They want Hollywood-level productions, but they don’t want to pay for them and they certainly don’t want to be responsible when those productions flop inside of their own algorithm. So here’s a perfect fix. For now, inflate views to protect people’s ego, and, eventually, kill the public view entirely.

Last week, Google announced that their researchers and a team of collaborators had successfully mapped a male fruit fly’s brain. And now that we have a fully mapped fly brain, people are hooking it up to different interfaces. Which are both horrifying and fascinating.

Obviously, the first question is whether or not a fly can play Doom. It can. Coinbase engineer Alex Wormuth built a site where you can watch along. He told Futurism that he’s basically hijacked the fly’s dopamine receptors so it understands taking damage.

Wormuth also built STONKFLY, which uses a fly brain to trade crypto all day. The site was offline when I checked it this morning, but here’s a video on X.

Alistair McLeay, a CEO at AI firm GRW, set up the fly brain on a flight simulator and let it fly a 747. Another developer built a rig to let it play Super Mario 64. Another set it loose on Beat Saber. And someone made it play a J-Pop song. Someone else got it to play DOTA 2. Here’s a guide to how to get working on your own machine if you want.

Honestly, this whole thing has given me a lot of insight into the fifth-dimensional beings that trapped my brain in one of their computers. Seems fun. I hope they load up a new program for me to explore.

Our researcher Adam quite often will tell me about something “blowing up” that I have never heard of before. And, usually, I cannot for the life of me make heads or tails of what he’s talking about. It happened again a few weeks ago when he excitedly told me that Verity was about to become the next Skibidi Toilet. I had no idea what that meant and I assume you, dear reader, don’t either.

I am now starting to see Verity posts in the wild. So I will absolutely be making Adam explain what the heck is happening here in our issue on Friday. But for now I’ll leave you with a very simple explanation.

Adam briefly covered this in an issue last month, but, basically, Verity is a haunted smiley face that stars in a mega popular Minecraft mod. It’s all over TikTok and Instagram now. Will have more on this very soon!

Yes, this is real. You can finally play Skyrim as an IKEA Kallax.

P.S. here’s Braden’s Infinite Tour Of Italy.

***Any typos in this email are on purpose actually***