Post by @samvines@awful.systems

2026-10-11 09:52 UTC

Spotted this the day it came out. It’s largely reporting Dwarkesh Patel’s blog post about the different “civilisations” of agents as if it were fact. Very disappointed in Kurzgesagt who previously seemed pretty “with it”. But then, as someone with a formal background in compsci, stats, NLP and machine learning, perhaps this is Gell-Mann Amnesia/Knoll’s Law of Media literacy at work…

Replies (2)

@Architeuthis@awful.systems 2026-10-11 11:04

They had a couple of videos openly sponsored by effective altruists a while ago. Could be they are still downstream of EA money, or they got audience captured because pretending the inevitable scifi future is just around the corner sells.

Open ##4985782
@lurker@awful.systems 2026-11-03 09:37

Late response but I looked at the sources page, and the first paragraph is about how they anthropomorphise AI to ‘make a better narrative’ Disclaimer: We use anthropomorphism as a narrative tool in the script to make the story more understandable. Otherwise, we do not attribute human traits to AI agents or claim that AI agents have motivations, wants, or desires similar to humans. We use the words “unethical”, “awareness”, “civilization”, or “die” as metaphors to communicate the events, rather than referring to the true meanings of the concepts or in the same ways that they are applied to humans. Also, no part of the script is to be interpreted as assigning legal responsibility to any party.

Open ##5471862