Discussion
Jacob Coxon: how to run an AI doomsday media campaign
to keep you talking about Skynet — not the data centre down the road
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3IoTZNN6iM&list=UU9rJrMVgcXTfa8xuMnbhAEA - video
https://pivottoai.libsyn.com/20260910-jacob-coxon-how-to-run-an-ai-doomsday-media-campaign - podcast
time: 6 min 20 sec
https://pivot-to-ai.com/2026/09/10/jacob-coxon-how-to-run-an-ai-doomsday-media-campaign/ - blog post
@davidgerard I love the stuff about the timing, how the WSJ ran the story before Coxon got his first tweet up and then it was immediately retweeted by a bunch of other Anthropic employees. Makes it super-obvious that this is a planned marketing campaign, so thank you for getting that information out there so clearly!
@davidgerard Curious that in T2 Sarah Connor is incacerated for going on about the AI apocalypse, but in the real world the people who mistook the movie for a documentary get feted...
@davidgerard What does that sentence mean? It feels like a reference that I don’t get(?)
“They do waterboard the influencers, though, so that’s something.”
@rauschma Literally the link before that sentence in the post
@davidgerard Ah, got it, thanks! I thought it was a cultural reference I didn’t understand. In hindsight, it’s clear how that sentence connects to the previous ones.
"This whole thing was an organised promotional campaign. It looks like obvious fresh-cut astroturf because it is."
I explained this to my son yesterday after he saw a headline from the Times. (Should we feel sorry for them that the WSJ got to open this and they're left to fluff it?)
@davidgerard yes. gettem. get those lesswrong fucks. chase them down one by one and call them our for for crimes against empirical reality
@davidgerard what’s this chucklefucks retirement plan look like
@cyberquixote vested OpenAI shares
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@davidgerard This is bullshit. AI is being heavily used by militaries in wars right now. This is incredibly dangerous and the danger is growing exponentially, really fast. AI is being heavily used to spread misinformation, extremely successfully. AIs are hacking and committing crimes right now, and those crimes are getting more serious. It's overwhelmingly likely that AIs are are already committing, undetected, far more serious crimes right this moment.