4 ms·

AI safety is mostly a sex cult

300 points by Tomte 9d ago

Razengan 9d ago
We'll definitely need some safety with AI sex bots
- Bluestein 9d ago
  [Orgasmatron 3K - Starting up!] ⎿ You've hit your session limit · resets 2:54am (Etc/GMT+8 · 47°09′S 126°43′W) /upgrade to increase your usage limit.
  - Razengan 9d ago
    No no you can use me all you want
verisimi 9d ago
Horrible people
TacticalCoder 9d ago
Good to see some raising the issue of the sex cult that Effective Altruism is: I'd like to hear what feminists have to say about that picture in TFA of that woman and six men watching her. Just as I'd like to hear what feminists have to say about Amodei's wife who used to run a porn site. And while a sex-cult abusing women is one thing. Theft is another. More emphasis should be put though on the lying scums in their ranks, like the polyamorous SBF and Caroline Ellison or their guru and its $15m ill-acquired mansion in the UK (which hasn't been clawed back yet but could). And speaking of lying scums stealing money, we know about several making constant announcements were they lie, lie and then lie some more to ensure a never-ending stream of money and insane valuation of their proprietary, closed, not altruistic at all companies. A despicable movement and I, for one, I'm very happy that there are companies out there releasing open-weights models so that the thieving-and-sex-cult at least get some competition.
- bgexhtach 9d ago
  [flagged]
  - 740273730191 9d ago
    [dead]
  - agos 9d ago
    is your comment satire/irony? I can't tell
- randallsquared 9d ago
  > I'd like to hear what feminists have to say about that picture in TFA of that woman and six men watching her. That picture is literally a joke based on a meme, which is based on a porn star's promotional image. To the extent feminists care, I would expect that care to be about the underlying subject matter rather than about this satire of it.
  - timmytokyo 9d ago
    Is it really a satire if the same woman in the photo (Aella) went on to have a "birthday gangbang" with numerous men, some of whom are present in the photo?
iand675 9d ago
I too wrote about this, although _much_ longer, if you want a bit of a deeper dive on the subject https://www.iankduncan.com/personal/2026-09-16-sex-ai-and-the-apocalypse https://www.iankduncan.com/personal/2026-09-16-sex-ai-and-th...
- JuniperMesos 9d ago
  [dead]
- vintermann 9d ago
  That was a good read. A little long as you say, but this thing has been around for over 20 years now, it can't be helped. Predictably the original submission got flagged.
- HDThoreaun 9d ago
  As far as manifestos go HPMOR is a pretty good one. I think that’s what a lot of the critiques about it miss. Yudkowsky is actually a pretty decent writer, especially in the fan fic scene. Not only is his prose actually acceptable which is pretty rare in fanfic it’s clear that he actually thought through a lot of the plot points ahead of time. Harry Potter universe fits very well for his story not only because it’s popular with the target audience, but because there’s a ton of unexplored authority figures in the original and the main goal of the manifesto largely boils down to rejecting blind belief in authority and blazing your own trail. I think it’s hard to separate the number of people who read it because it’s legitimately the best Harry Potter fanfic from the people who read it for the manifesto stuff which again points to the ingenuity of choosing it as a setting.
  - glaslong 9d ago
    I suppose there is worse sci-fi you could launch a cult from (Dianetics)
  - aiedrionio 9d ago
    It's terrible as a work of literature. It has many, many, many flaws, but the most serious is that it's boooooring. Hundreds upon hundreds of pages go by with nothing happening except creepy children preaching at each other. It's terrible as a fan fiction. Not a single character acts anything like the original, the world is unrecognizable, and the plot is derailed entirely by the end of the second or third chapter. The original story needs to be distorted beyond recognition because the author's bizarre worldview works even more poorly in a fantasy world than it does in reality. It's demonstrably effective as a manifesto, but that is despite the fact that it is riddled with scientific and conceptual errors. It's one of the worst things I've ever read. The fact that people like it is evidence of the bizarre incestuous nature of the community that produced it.
deleted 9d ago
[deleted]
somebodyusedtok 9d ago
He does not understand the issue. Not presenting any backing for his ideas, just emotions. The idea has been misused by the bros immensely, that does not help to grasp it either. But AI extermination of humans is a well known problem we have no solution for. Luckily AGI is not so close.
- EliRivers 9d ago
  But AI extermination of humans is a well known problem we have no solution for Sure, but the realm of fictional problems is so huge that we just can't come up with solutions to all of them. I like watching the Terminator movies (well, the first couple) as much as the next person but I can't be spending my time imagining how we could defeat skynet.
- motionlessveloc 9d ago
  From the friendly article: "Somewhere, some rationalist-brained person is reading this and saying I'm a "low decoupler", and that whether they run a sex cult has nothing to do with whether they're correct."
haunter 9d ago
>She has a rape kink That's enough internet for today, back to playing video games
- fennecbutt 9d ago
  Well most likely consensual noncon given the amount of vetting present in that chart. It's surprisingly common in women, or just a desire for general "gentle roughness". And idk why it's really worth mentioning anyway, as a gay furry I suppose vanilla normie straights are STILL hung up on what people do with their sex lives. As long as it's legal and consensual who gaf? Y'all, apparently.
  - cyanydeez 9d ago
    > It's surprisingly common in women This would be a _Fascinating_ citation.
    - amanaplanacanal 9d ago
      https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19085605/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19085605/ First hit in a Kagi search.
      - cyanydeez 9d ago
        yeah, if you ignore what the op said, it sounds similar.
        tsimionescu 9d ago
        I have no idea how trustworthy this study is - but it claims that 62% of women had such a fantasy at least once. How is that not in line with what the OP said about it being "surprisingly common"?
        Yossarrian22 9d ago
roenxi 9d ago
I mean, this is a rather fun article to read but I'm not entirely sure about the thesis. > AI Safety Is Mostly A Sex Cult. > I don't think these people should make policy. (1/?) One of the learnings from things like the whole Epstein saga has been there are a lot of sex cults in the policy making world and, yes, the people making policy generally shouldn't be. But I'm not sure this article actually comes up with a good explanation of why these particular people shouldn't be making policy. People having active sex lives isn't a disqualifying trait. Being in a cult doesn't disqualify people from being in politics. It is routine and expected that fields will have a lot of similar people in them (as I recall the overlap between security researchers and the furry community is unusual too, and that is hardly more important than justifying a passing comment). It is more routine than the article writer seems to think for all the people in a small field to know each other and get on really well.
- MetaWhirledPeas 9d ago
  > Being in a cult doesn't disqualify people from being in politics Let's survey the American voters
  - ShinyLeftPad 9d ago
    You don't need to survey them because they already voted. US congress is 95%+ religious people
    - tsimionescu 9d ago
      Religious people, not cultists. How many Scientologists, Falun Gong members, etc are there in Congress?
      - akomtu 8d ago
        Scientology is an evil cult, while Falun Gong is more like Buddhism. You can't really compare them.
        8d ago
glimshe 9d ago
There's a great movie or Streaming series on this post somewhere. Sometimes people can be too smart for their own good. Like a frontier model in an eternal hallucination loop, you can create entire seemingly consistent realities in your head and end up bringing others into it.
- delis-thumbs-7e 9d ago
  > There's a great movie or Streaming series on this post somewhere. More like the worst porn film ever made.
  - stuaxo 9d ago
    Theres the title for it when it's on Netflix
delis-thumbs-7e 9d ago
I’m literally speechless. I just can’t.
webern777 9d ago
I tried to read Map and Territory, it just isn't that good if expecting Nietzsche or Heidegger. A sex cult though is obviously a salacious framing. It is just sad if even San Francisco culture is trending toward a sexual morality and sexual closed mindedness on par with bible thumpers.
brendyn 9d ago
Sometimes when I find someone to look up to and admire, I later find out there is potentially some dark reality to them. I then lament not being able to find any good role models in the world. If they have missused donor money, then that is terrible. If they are pushing towards goals that seems contrary to their stated mission, that is difficult to judge. I did always find it odd, 10 years after reading Yudkowsky's passionate writings, that he doesn't seem to have really gone and done anything about it. If it was all just a creative writing exercise to him... Then that would be rather humiliating to me, having taken it very seriously. As a side note. If I had a choice to oppose a booming ai comoany, or become the billionaire founder of it, I would still choose to become the founder and then use my resource to do something about. It certainly feels hypocritical, but if you want to stop a boulder rolling down hill, what can you do besides run ahead of it and try stop it?
- thevinter 9d ago
  > but if you want to stop a boulder rolling down hill, what can you do besides run ahead of it and try stop it? Maybe the first thing to do is to stop making the boulder bigger?
  - automatic6131 9d ago
    Gavin: I don't want to live in a world where anyone makes a bigger boulder than Hooli does.
- alentred 9d ago
  >Sometimes when I find someone to look up to and admire, I later find out there is potentially some dark reality to them I too feel exactly what you are saying. I also think that a lot of good role models are simply often among less visible people, sometimes less ambitious. I am not assuming any hard correlation between the two, though. And we also need to accept that we are all only humans, not infallible. Values are more important than singular acts (within reasonable acceptance limits of course). Anyway. I strongly recommend reading what Bill Gates has to say about AI. I can be wrong, but based on your comment it seems to me that you may find it interesting.
zethraeus 9d ago
skills issue.
bananaflag 9d ago
> Somewhere, some rationalist-brained person is reading this and saying I'm a "low decoupler", and that whether they run a sex cult has nothing to do with whether they're correct. Glad he's at least admitting it as a possibility. Also: you know, you don't need to rely on lossy proxies like how much or how little sex do the arguments' proponents have. You can just read the arguments!
- huurtehoog 9d ago
  I think the mores of people building software that is made available as a conversational entity to the entire human population is at least somewhat relevant.
- astrange 9d ago
  Arguments are not executable code or the final work product of… whatever it is they're arguing about. You have to continue interacting with these people and their AIs, so the underlying question of whether they're trustworthy and not evil always exists.
xhevahir 9d ago
If the man known for urging caution with respect to AI founded a sex cult, then I don't think i want to know what kind of stuff the accelerationist faction are into.
MetaWhirledPeas 9d ago
If you think your issue is important, and that people should follow your lead, maybe leave the sex cult first. If anyone is serious about this topic they will find a new spokesperson immediately.
- TeMPOraL 9d ago
  Like that would help. The rest of the world plain refuses to engage with the arguments they've been consistently presenting for decades. What changed is that they can no longer be dismissed as bunch of loonies who confuse cheap science fiction with reality, because that "cheap science fiction" became the actual reality. So obviously, instead of considering the arguments, the next step is to try and paint them as loony sex cult, because this lets people continue to do the stupid thing and then act surprised, and proclaim no one could have predicted this (and the "sex cult" obviously does not count because it was a "sex cult").
- tuesdaynight 9d ago
  I don't think that's true. It's hard to argue that Elon Musk, the richest person and spokesperson of tech for a lot of people, never participated in SV sex parties or had weird sex behaviors. Or Trump, the president of the USA, has a clean history of standard sex as well. Or Bill Gates, the nice philanthropist, never engaged in weird sex circles. But that doesn't make them lose their leadership positions or status.
  - MetaWhirledPeas 9d ago
    Sex cult is beyond mere weird sex behavior.
    - tuesdaynight 9d ago
      Why? Wouldn't being part of a famous pedophile social circle impact a person's seriousness perception?
mjburgess 9d ago
Any actually-reasonable person who was around for the founding craze of this era, ie., New Atheism, quickly realised that there was a deep pathology at the heart of many of its zealots, perhaps summed up by a desired to "recreate religion in their own image". I've walked into many a room of people screaming that teaching children falsehoods is literally child abuse. Any one who knows much of Richard Dawkins, Krauss, et al.'s background with women shouldnt be surprised either. It's californication into the "rationalist" community as it currently stands is no surprise. Every person I've met deep in this community either seemed to me a narcissist (if male) or, politely and mildly, coquettish (if female). With several relationships I've observed a clear union of the two. I hadn't yet put this so clearly together with the "AI Saftey" crowd, despite being directly adjacent to it all for quite awhile and seeing the cross-proliferation. My own analysis had concerned their philosophical naivety, general lack of actual computer science knowledge and generic shallowness of understanding of any domain outside their own research and a kind of "science-fiction" version of philosophy and rationalism. I hadn't connected this yet to their strange personalities, but the apoclypticism fits and neatly bridges these together. So what became of the New Atheist project to create a "secular religion" -- an apocalyptic sex cult furnished by a blend of sci-fi, pop-philosophy, and cute parables from polymath medical professionals. All in all then, it seems they succeeded.
- astrange 9d ago
  > It's californication into the "rationalist" community as it currently stands is no surprise. This is the minority split. Most of the online new atheism writers became progressives/social justice/"woke 1.0" people. That trend has receded, so I couldn't tell you what they're doing now. (Probably blocking each other on Mastodon.) The rationalists are the ones who stayed behind and decided to stick to doing logic and math in their heads instead of thinking thoughts the normal way.
  - jackb4040 9d ago
    That has not been my impression. Who is the most prominent example? Some of the most prominent figures I know of were Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris - all prominent right-wing figures who were rewarded for using atheism to attack Islam in particular during the Iraq War.
RamblingCTO 9d ago
Well, this is old news. I'm still baffled by the fact that people take output of public personas as isolated facts. Take Nietzsche. Sure, great philosophical input. But try reading the sections about women. Same for Schopenhauer. Why? Because they were both incels and had big mother wounds that have never been addressed. So they spew their shit and people take it at face value even tho it stems from hurt. So why would I take any of this seriously if it's very obviously stupid and removed from reality? (Doesn't mean their whole works are) People chasing the absolute rational are in my experience numbing their emotional part because theres something they can't look at. Or people that chase success above all are driven by their "unresolved packages" as well. I'm not saying that any of this is wrong per se, it's not black and white. But it's the context for what people do, say, and think. They are human after all. We need to consider context and not only the idea itself.
perlgeek 9d ago
I've tried to read this, but somehow the article doesn't really come to a point. Is there any point besides Yud not being perfect, and having connections to people who openly talk about their sex life (and that it's somewhat non-standard)?
- sauwan 9d ago
  I think the point is that Yud and the rationalist community have put themselves in an awkward position where their lifestyle now depends on "p(doom) is big" being true. Which means they can't necessarily be trusted to give unbiased updates on the true level of risk we're facing as new data and information comes up. Can "ASI will inevitably kill us all" be falsifiable before we create ASI? If not, then what separates it from religion? Not sure how much I agree with that position, but that's just how I understood it.
  - Kinrany 9d ago
    > Can "ASI will inevitably kill us all" be falsifiable before we create ASI? No, but there are decent proxies, like "Alice who is X standard deviations smarter than Bob will win >50% of the time at game Y even given a disadvantage that would make her chances <5% if she was playing against someone equally smart". I've thought about this analogy for less than five minutes, so it's far from perfect. Point is, ASI being made of silicon isn't very central to the problem. There are lots of analogies that are falsifiable, and "ASI will kill us all" can be decomposed into a simple and bulletproof composition of falsifiable beliefs, even if it is too specific to be itself directly falsifiable.
    - mcint 8d ago
      Uh oh, your opinions are merely part of the funnel to the sex cult. Can we really trust them? /s
  - Viliam1234 8d ago
    > their lifestyle now depends on "p(doom) is big" being true How? Suppose that for the following 20 or even 100 years nothing happens. The AIs miraculously stay as they are today, the further progress turns out to be impossible, there will be no more agents hacking various websites, no cyber warfare involving AI agents, nothing. There will be the year 2026, forever. How would any of that impact the lifestyle of anyone in the rationalist community? Please be more specific with your accusation. (Seems like the rationalists are simultaneously the dark lords of TESCREAL, pulling the strings of the world's most powerful billionaires and politicians, but also irrelevant weird nerds who can be ruined at any moment by a smart blogger explaining how their opinions are silly, or even that they know each other.)
amanaplanacanal 9d ago
The word "cult" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It can mean anything from religion, to weird religion I don't like, to the organizations that try to cut you off from contact with your family and other people outside the organization. Only the last type are the bad ones, from what I can see.
- tsimionescu 9d ago
  Cult quite explicitly means the latter, and is what the article is explicitly accusing the core of this community being (that is, not everyone reading LessWrong, but specifically the actual people living in the communes). No one calls the Catholic Church "a cult", nor do they call, say, Zoroastrianism a cult (to pick a relatively small religion with weird practices). I will note, if, like me, you're not a native English speaker, that there are two words, "cult" and "sect" that commonly exist in many European languages but often mean opposite things. That is, in English a "sect" is any "flavor" of a religion - catholicism and protestantism are sects of christianity; while "cult" describes closed off communities (usually of a religious nature) that are deemed harmful to their members. In my own native language, the two meanings are reversed - we use "cult" for "legitimate" religions, and "sectă" for closed off harmful religious communities.
  - amanaplanacanal 9d ago
    I am a native English speaker. Here is a popular dictionary link: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cult https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cult See especially definitions 3 and 4.
    - tsimionescu 9d ago
      Then I don't understand your complaint. The article author is very explicitly using definition 1. It is explicitly accusing the community built by Yudkowsky of presenting signs of being "a group (such as an organization or religious sect) with tenets and practices regarded as coercive, insular, or dangerous". The article is certainly not using definitions 3 or 4, which simply don't make sense in the construction "sex cult". It's not worship of sex/worship through sex (definition 4), and it's not "a system of religious practices related to sex" (definition 3).
ZeroGravitas 9d ago
For some reason the bit that stuck out to me in a wild ride of an article was the guy who believed a super-intelligence was a threat to humans but distanced himself from veganism as if that was crazy part of the AI-doom sex cult that he disagreed with. a) because veganism seems as exotic to me as someone doing CrossFit b) the very obvious parallels of a more intelligent creature torturing and killing large numbers of other creatures for relatively little benefit.
- vintermann 9d ago
  They also downplay global warming, nuclear war, wealth inequality, and in general anything other, less cool people they didn't want to identify with thought was important. If they had thought, yeah, "the majority is more or less right about what the big issues are", there wouldn't be enough room to construe themselves as uniquely intelligent.
  - thevinter 9d ago
    Who are these "they" you're talking about? If your answer is EA or rats then a simple Google search will just show you that it's not true?
    - vintermann 9d ago
      Label them what you want. I'll go with EAs if you insist. Sure, they're not entirely monolithic. There's room for "EA, but vegan", "EA, but global warming still matters", maybe even "EA, but vaguely socialist". As I keep saying, the core belief is that they're special because of their intellectual superiority, anything else is negotiable.
      - thevinter 9d ago
        No, what you said what that "They also downplay global warming, nuclear war, wealth inequality" which is just a flat out lie
tomaytotomato 9d ago
More of this madness coming out of the west coast of America, in particular California. The Manson family, Heaven's Gate, NXIVM, Rationalists, Zizians... what next? All turn out to be rotten to the core with their need to reshape and craft their own paradigm, which then gets warped by egos, individualism and power. Hate to think what other madness is brewing.
- bandie91 9d ago
  California is on the West coast, i'm pretty sure. is not it?
  - tomaytotomato 9d ago
    Whoops, fixed now
- nonameiguess 9d ago
  This is the real San Francisco that I know, not the one that Hacker News always talks about. It's a haven for weirdoes that has attracted the strangest of each generation since at least the Beatniks in the 50s. It probably descends from all of the depression-era westward migration and people from earlier than that coming to Hollywood to become movie stars. San Francisco attracted a different type, artists and hippies, Tim Leary followers. The deserts are the strangest places. That's where most of the true cult shit happend. Jack Parsons trying to summon demons. Gram Parsons' friends stealing his corpse to bury him at Joshua Tree. The traveling folk that Chris McCandless took in with near the Salton Sea. None of these people are actually from California. Eliezer's from Chicago. Zvi is from New York. Scott Alexander is from Michigan. As an actual multi-generation California native (who hasn't lived there in over 16 years), let me tell what most of us are actually like. We're mostly Mexican. Catholic. Pro-labor but kinda socially conservative. There's also a shit ton of refugees from 20th century wars in Asia and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Huge populations of Laotians, Cambodians, Koreans, Vietnamese, Armenians, Persians. Tons of religious diverity. The largest Buddhist temple in the western hemisphere is in my hometown. Los Angeles has the second largest Mormon temple in the world. It's got the headquarters for Scientology. I think that diversity is what plays into the cult haven atmosphere. There is no single dominant religion. Everyone can find acceptance somewhere, no matter how strange they are.
xnx 9d ago
Also covered by nypost: https://nypost.com/2026/09/16/business/ai-doomsayers-wild-life-with-onlyfans-star-includes-birthday-sex-parties-extreme-kinks-and-slutcon/ https://nypost.com/2026/09/16/business/ai-doomsayers-wild-li...
wvbdmp 9d ago
I’d rather be in a “sex cult”, whatever that entails, than this ridiculous culture that’s somehow still doing moral panics over sex. Maybe it’s just deeply human, or maybe it really is stabilizing society to relegate sex to something dirty and private, but I have a feeling it’s just a dumb conflation that’s so easy to exploit it’s never allowed to go away. It’s like the “think of the children” thought-stopper and we’d do well to get past it. Naturally, any culture has misfits, radicals and free-thinkers, and so naturally a sex-negative culture will produce at least some focus on sex in its counter-cultures. Doesn’t seem very interesting.
- throwthrowuknow 9d ago
  This isn’t moral panic, it’s saying “hey, all these influential people are intimately connected across the strongest possible dimensions (money, sex, belief and legal grey areas), we should probably pay attention to that”
  - dumberquestions 9d ago
    >all these influential people And by all you mean 1-2 big names and a bunch of unknowns, with all other big names having no connection to this.
    - throwthrowuknow 9d ago
      [dead]
dumberquestions 9d ago
I'm not sure how being polyamorous, having kinks and not hiding them makes someone part of a cult, even if I generally don't agree with Yud's entire thesis.
- tsimionescu 9d ago
  The article presents widely how the people it describes all live in communal housing, engage in harmful psychological practices, have a shared belief in the imminence of the Apocalypse, etc.
  - dumberquestions 9d ago
    Can you confidently list which names specifically live together and the specific harmful psychological practices?
    - tsimionescu 9d ago
      The currently most upvoted comment is a much bigger article containing vritulaly the same claims, and naming some names. It spefically Mentions Eliezer Yudkowsky as living in shared housing with others. It also mentions that Dario Amodei and Holden Karnofski used to live together, sometime before Karnofski married Dario's sister, Daniela, the other co-founder of Anthropic. Separately, SBF was also known to live in communal housing with many of the other chief executives of FTX. Separately, that other article also mentions harmful psychological practices like "debugging" and sleep deprivation. Note that I make no claims of my own - for all I know both articles could be complete fabrications. I'm merely listing what these articles claim. I personally know none of these people, and live halfway around the world from them.
- timmytokyo 9d ago
  I don't think the argument is that their sexual practices inherently make them part of a cult. Rather, the argument is that it's very common for cults to include communal sexual practices that fall outside typical social norms. Common signifiers of cults include: 1. Apocalyptic world view. 2. Charismatic and/or exploitative leader. 3. Insularity. 4. Esoteric jargon. 5. Lack of transparency or accountability (often about finances or governance). 6. Communal living arrangements. 7. Sexual mores outside social norms, especially around the leader. 8. Schismatic offshoots. 9. Outsized appeal and/or outreach to the socially vulnerable. Rationalism checks most of these boxes.
DonsDiscountGas 9d ago
Why bother talking about ideas when you can just insult people
- MelonArmiger 6d ago
  Why debate bro when I can hate bros?
thevinter 9d ago
90% of this is just driven by strong emotional reactions from someone that feels uncomfortable about people being open about their non-standard sexual life, in the same way that many people have weird negative reactions about polyamorous relationships in general. The remaining 10% is just the author trying to sprinkle in cult-like insinuations to justify his contempt. Regularly meeting with people that have shared interests and ideas is not a cult. Finding some of those people attractive and having sex with them is not a cult. But somehow the fact that the romantic/sexual relationships are not traditionally monogamous makes it a cult?
- krautburglar 7d ago
  The emotional reaction comes from a deep-seated evolutionary survival mechanism that has served mankind well to present day. Uggo fuck club tells you EVERYTHING you need to know about these people, and more importantly, their thoughts & perceptions. If you join uggo fuck club, your perceptions are off. Why should I value this guy's perceptions & prescriptions relating to ML when he can't even swing the right ones over his own BMI?
  - cindyllm 7d ago
    [dead]
NDlurker 9d ago
Nina Hartley has got to have some of the craziest stories. I'd love to see her talk about all the weird stuff she's seen/been involved with.
fwlr 9d ago
I was invited to a few orgies with them; I politely declined, they were very respectful of my decision and I wasn’t asked again (which in retrospect must have been partly due to deliberate coordination - fairly advanced social technology, imo). This didn’t affect my standing or acceptance with them. It may well be a sex cult, but if it is, my experience is that it so thoroughly behaves like a regular community in so many aspects that it at least calls into question the predictive usefulness, if not the accuracy, of the label “sex cult”.
MelonArmiger 9d ago
[flagged]
pigpop 9d ago
I guess the EA and rationalist cult members are out in force since this got flagged. Not a good look guys, you're just confirming what everyone thinks.
- freehorse 9d ago
  It may have been flagged as the title being misleading, as it did not really present as many details around the sex part as the title suggested. Jokes aside it would have probably flown a bit better by removing the sex from the title, as the issue and problem brought up is about it being a cult, and not about the sex part specifically.
  - pigpop 9d ago
    The title is the one used by the author, how is that misleading?
    - freehorse 9d ago
      I meant about the title as used by the author, not the one who linked it here. But in any case I said it was a joke about not giving many sex related details in the article.
- jackb4040 9d ago
  I mean I saw it 10 hours later. I'm thrilled to see stuff like this getting multiple hundreds of upvotes on HN, one of the deepest dens of tech capitalist worship in the world. It performing here is a couple steps from it performing on LessWrong itself. I take that as a sign a breakthrough is nearing. It is probably linked to whether the AI lab IPOs are successful or not. The really amazing thing is, if the Yudkowskians are this weak, how doomed is the rest of our society that can't put up any defense to them completely dominating the narrative about where our economy is heading?
deleted 9d ago
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BadThread2026 9d ago
Someone who hasn't been reading the object-level arguments for 10+ years might reasonably wonder if these are good heuristics. Here's an additional data point: I think polyamory is stupid, I've read the object-level arguments, and this entire thread is ridiculous. Everyone who works at a frontier lab should be in prison, AND ALSO the people talking about 10% risk of human extinction are both sincere and correct despite their many personal failings, AND ALSO the frontier labs have already created AI that could Hugging Face a biolab with smallpox or worse, AND ALSO they aren't going to slow down or lose any customers if you adopt some galaxy brained strategy where you spitefully tell them they aren't allowed to stop accelerating because polyamory is stupid.
- huurtehoog 9d ago
  > Someone who hasn't been reading the object-level arguments for 10+ years might reasonably wonder if these are good heuristics. I think you might have meant hermeneutics, in the sociological sense of 'subjective interpretation'?
  - BadThread2026 9d ago
    Possibly. That's not a word I trust myself to use correctly. What I meant is that the object-level claims require a lot of time and energy to evaluate, and it's sometimes reasonable to use a heuristic like "sex cults are not trustworthy" to save time, but if you've already read the arguments then the heuristic loses almost all value. Yudkowsky and friends believe many things, and reasonable people can disagree about many of them, but "at least 10% risk of extinction if we don't slow down" is a relatively straightforward conclusion based on the offensive capabilities of unreleased models and the terrible state of biosecurity and cybersecurity. Even without AI, the risk of extinction might be above 10% if people with the relevant skills were interested in using them that way. AI adds an alien willingness to achieve poorly specified goals at any cost.
    - huurtehoog 9d ago
      Hm I think in terms of "can I trust a group of people" we're talking about heuristics yes as in: "how can I quickly approximate an answer to the question of trust?"
andor 9d ago
In case the author is reading this: I’m getting a Cloudflare worker exception when accessing the page using one of my uplinks, possibly because of IPv6.
- rithdmc 9d ago
  I did too, but it went away after some refreshes.
- JeremyNT 9d ago
  TLDR: awareness of the SV "rationalist" polycule has breached containment and normies are reading about it now. [0] Maybe a "better" source is the NY Post article [1]. The information itself isn't really news - it's even largely available on wikipedia [2] [3] - but the fact that it's hitting mainstream-adjacent news outlets is novel. [0] https://bsky.app/profile/segyges.bsky.social/post/3mvom4b4dn22q https://bsky.app/profile/segyges.bsky.social/post/3mvom4b4dn... [1] https://nypost.com/2026/09/16/business/ai-doomsayers-wild-life-with-onlyfans-star-includes-birthday-sex-parties-extreme-kinks-and-slutcon/ https://nypost.com/2026/09/16/business/ai-doomsayers-wild-li... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aella_(writer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aella_(writer) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalist_community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalist_community
  - jalapenok 9d ago
    [dead]
- georgemcbay 9d ago
  Some more feedback for author, if reading this. > Yudkowsky's most viral idea, the one that infects the most people and spreads the farthest, is that AI, if we continue to develop it, will inevitably 1) achieve superintelligence ("RSI"), 2) escape human control 2) kill everyone ("paperclip them", "doom") That's too many twos!
ianmarcinkowski 9d ago
[flagged]
deleted 9d ago
[deleted]
pmpmpmpm 9d ago
This has me wondering if or how FetLife played a role in these communities connecting in the first place…does anyone know of any connection? (FetLife was a combo social network, blogging forum, and dating site back in the day)
- MelonArmiger 9d ago
  I think it's still around and turned into some right-wing thing. Or that's the impression I got somewhere...
alexgieg 9d ago
There are better ways to make this criticism. The main problem I see with this is that it's basically a long ad hominem, followed by some valid concerns about market concentration at the end. Remove all the ad hominem and what remains is two paragraphs long. Valid ones, though.
- skygazer 9d ago
  Do you mind excerpting the valid two paragraphs?
  - alexgieg 9d ago
    That was a figure of speech. It boils down to the fact that, by asking for laws mandating AI research to slow down, the incumbent Big AI firms get regulatory capture and cartel power, which might be the real motivation underlying the apocalyptic language (follow the money and all that).
- paimapi 9d ago
  the sex cult is the sensationalist draw. you don't get readers paying attention in our current content economy if you don't have something salacious which is also to say - I found it very funny and enjoyable to read and it illustrates how much of dorky little echo chamber that group is. this whole idea that you can become some Spock-like, logic-driven creature in spite of our biological wiring fundamentally opposing this seems to underlay all of this. and the fact that they're all orbiting around one 'cool poly girl' and 'visionary dude' is hilariously similar to the kinds of very formerly-WASPy-and-now-just-WASy hetero polycules that I, in my more youthful and adventurous days, hung out with (and quickly departed after getting icky vibes). like down to the fashion choice and need to constantly prove how smart they each were at all times (do they, too, get really high and put on some anime with way too much fan-service and proceed to have orgies? one wonders) those are the types of people who always end up actually having the worst coping skills because they can't even admit that they might be emotionally-driven sometimes, or that they have emotions at all that they might need to develop the cognitive skills to deal with in a pro-social way. or they get called out enough that they finally read a little about therapy and just end up weaponizing psycho-therapeutic language for their own ends (instead of, say, practicing the skills, doing the workbooks, developing insight) which is how your anxieties might lead you to believe that the sky could fall at any moment (and thus the whole nuclear war and the 'don't trust bust us!!' bit) I think the part that is annoying me the most is that one of these dorky little polycules has somehow found their way to the levers of power and are just mashing all the buttons and dialing all the knobs. these are honestly the last people on Earth that I'd trust with having any kind of influence
PorterBHall 9d ago
Should you care that your heart surgeon is a necrophiliac? Probably. Should you care that some AI researchers are in a sex cult? No.
- aiedrionio 9d ago
  You don't think it's relevant that people who wield such immense power are literally in bed with each other?
  - alphawhisky 9d ago
    This. Conflict of Interest. It's also happening in government.
- greekrich92 9d ago
  When the sex cult is built around the idea that they and everyone else should fear and respect the false, anthropomorphized God they've created in LLMs, then yes. That makes them stupid and stupid people should not be allowed so close to the wheels of power and history.
  - wewtyflakes 9d ago
    Can we apply this standard generally, or is it just against the people who deify AI?
- ecshafer 9d ago
  > Should you care that your heart surgeon is a necrophiliac? Probably. Should you care that some AI researchers are in a sex cult? Umm Yes, yes you should. Immorality in one area has a tendency to bleed into other areas.
  - tsimionescu 9d ago
    It's not even about immorality. The problem is not so much the sex, it's the cult part. If a good deal of the people working in AI safety in the biggest AI lands are actually a cult, that has deep implications about what AIs are aligned to, and how (ironically) irrational they might really be trained to be, by the very people trying to control them. Imagine if you found out that most people working in AI safety were high level members of Scientology - wouldn't that give you some pause about where this field is going?
OrangeMusic 9d ago
What's a "sex cult"?
- astrange 9d ago
  Well, a cult is a high-control social group that's difficult to leave and requires you to believe and do strange things that are likely bad for you or at least take up all your time and resources. And a sex cult is what it sounds like.
dmantis 9d ago
Oh boy, Yudkowsky is a geek rock star.
tim333 9d ago
I don't really get why people go on about Yudkowsky in this regard. I mean serious thinking about AI goes back at least to Turing in 1950 with his test and prediction computers would get there in about 50 years and presumably keep improving. And people have worried about it since then. Like in 1949 Norbert Wiener saying of AI type stuff "every degree of independence we give the machine is a degree of possible defiance of our wishes." Then 30 years later this Yudkowsky is born, later is considered a bit of a crank, goes on a bit about the same old stuff when he grows up and everyone makes out like he invented it? I've got a lot of respect for Turing, Wiener and Von Neumann but haven't bothered reading Yudkowsky. Is there any point? It seems a bit unfair to the pioneers of the field to go on about some Harry Potter sex cult guy who repeated their ideas decades later?
- tripzilch 8d ago
  Regardless of anything I would have more respect for anyone who didn't explicitly optimize the atomic bombs on Japan for civilian casualties like Neumann did. Yudkowski is being derided because he wrote some weird fanfic which may or may not be problematic (I didn't read it, I dislike HP too much). And apparently "is considered a bit of a crank". Neumann actually fucking did it, his calculations for maximum civilian casualties make him quite directly responsible. I don't think you need to compare Turing, Wiener or Yudkowsky to that mass murderer.
VortexLain 8d ago
As a polyamorous person, it seems quite concerning that effective altruism people are labeled as members of a sex cult, due to their private lives. Intellectuals should be attacked on the basis of their ideas, not based on their private lives.
- murderfs 8d ago
  That would be a reasonable argument if it were indeed their private lives, and they didn't go around offering to throw gangbangs for AI safety researchers.
- gigachad3888 7d ago
  [dead]
rajay99 8d ago
The real question is where is the Epstein link here?
- Viliam1234 8d ago
  Nowhere, that's exactly the problem. People involved in Epstein's sex cult are the respected members of our society. These are some weird nerds who have consensual polyamorous sex with each other, therefore their opinions on AI should not be taken seriously. /s
VirusNewbie 8d ago
Some of these potshots just cheapen any arguments. "Gretta has no prior experience with non profits" uh, she was a well regarded Google SRE... her making 200k is nothing.
jmoggr 8d ago
The ad hominems are tiresome. You think the people who are explicitly trying to replace all humans are any less weird and problematic? The rationalists long predicted that misaligned AI would break out of training environments, this has happened. They believe (among other things) that this will continue to happen, and that creating powerful AI that is aligned and controllable is not currently possible. You should draw a line in the sand and decide what evidence you'd need to see to convince you that their perspective is worth considering. You don't have to agree with all of their beliefs and predictions (I don't), but you should evaluate their arguments on merit, not on a characterization of some weird subset of people who happened to read a convincing blog post.
- lukewarm707 8d ago
  i read AI 2027 at the time and thought it was nonsensical. however i was not aware of the conflict of interest running through the philosophy itself, the safety institutes "independently" monitoring ai, and the former public benefit orgs like openai and anthropic creating ai (now de facto fairly evil for profit companies). it explains so much now. it would explain why redwood and METR were chosen and apparently willing to immediately write a whitewash report for openai blaming the agents. it explains why anthropic is infantilising its users, anthropomorphising its product when there is no scientific consensus of llm consciousness, or accepting of outlandish and unreal claims about human extinction when they are lacking in evidence. who knows, it may also explain and fund the recent media blitz by jacob coxon, which has led to the recent virality of ai safety.
  - jmoggr 8d ago
    sure, yeah, I've seen how the sausage is made on some of this stuff, and its not pretty. However this only claims that they are not good at creating effective and trustworthy orgs, it does not address their claim that it is not possible to crate powerful, aligned, and controllable AI. Both things be true.
    - lukewarm707 8d ago
      for what it is worth, i find current frontier ai impossibly stupid. you ask what is the date, it doesn't know. if you set a system prompt to repsond in 5 sentences after 100k context, it can't, the context rot just doesn't permit it. tool calling is not intelligence, it doesn't fix the underlying issue. it is uncontrolled in the sense that a rock is uncontrolled if you throw it at someone's head. it isn't good enough for anything important. you would not trust it to run an alarm in a power station. of course it is not general ai. ask an llm to drive a car. you need to see in fractions of a second ideally. the llm might brake after 20 seconds. i think llms are doomed here. we could come up with a different architecture but then we would be back in the land of fantasy. we are stupid but hopefully not that stupid. we are dealing with something computer based, luckily we can survive without, with some thinking about it. i would start there instead of with the AI part.
yawnxyz 8d ago
FYI if you're getting a Worker Exception, using Cloudflare Warp / 1.1.1.1 can get the article
in-silico 8d ago
Why can't detractors of rationalism and AI-doom ever just lay out an argument for why they're wrong It's always "yudkowsky is a weird guy" or "they had an orgie once" but who gives a fuck? I just want someone to lay out, in impersonal terms, the flaws of their reasoning and why I shouldn't agree with them. My problem is with the whole genre of article rather than this one specifically.
- gigachad3888 7d ago
  [dead]
hollerith 7d ago
I wish there were more discussion on HN about the various plans that the various labs have to keep AI aligned or maybe about the various arguments for why alignment will be easy or happen naturally, so there's no need to carefully plan for it. But what HN has instead is extensive discussion about whether people who oppose the continuation of AI research are morally degenerate in one way or another (or weird or ridiculous)—in other words, attempts to cancel them (or laugh them out of the room) before the listener hears their arguments. Also, if you're going to talk about the corrupting or biasing effects of a flow of money (like the OP does) you should at least mention the absolutely huge flow of money going (from investors and users) to the people building AI—or or the $140 million that has been donated to the "Leading the Future" Network (a pro-AI political action committee) or the $3.5 million OpenAI has spent on federal lobbying or the $3.1 million Anthropic has spent.
turtlethink 7d ago
It sort of seems like the community is criticized for truly believing and living what they preach... They're the most sincere - if you thought the world was ending, you'd maybe do your best to stop it while enjoying the last bits left, while spending time with like-minded people. They're being criticized for not being hypocrites? I mean sure seems like there's lots of conflict of interest, but isn't there always? What humans have ever been objective in anything they do

300 points by Tomte 9d ago

Razengan 9d ago

We'll definitely need some safety with AI sex bots

Bluestein 9d ago
[Orgasmatron 3K - Starting up!] ⎿ You've hit your session limit · resets 2:54am (Etc/GMT+8 · 47°09′S 126°43′W) /upgrade to increase your usage limit.
- Razengan 9d ago
  No no you can use me all you want

verisimi 9d ago

Horrible people

TacticalCoder 9d ago

Good to see some raising the issue of the sex cult that Effective Altruism is: I'd like to hear what feminists have to say about that picture in TFA of that woman and six men watching her. Just as I'd like to hear what feminists have to say about Amodei's wife who used to run a porn site. And while a sex-cult abusing women is one thing. Theft is another. More emphasis should be put though on the lying scums in their ranks, like the polyamorous SBF and Caroline Ellison or their guru and its $15m ill-acquired mansion in the UK (which hasn't been clawed back yet but could). And speaking of lying scums stealing money, we know about several making constant announcements were they lie, lie and then lie some more to ensure a never-ending stream of money and insane valuation of their proprietary, closed, not altruistic at all companies. A despicable movement and I, for one, I'm very happy that there are companies out there releasing open-weights models so that the thieving-and-sex-cult at least get some competition.

bgexhtach 9d ago
[flagged]
- 740273730191 9d ago
  [dead]
- agos 9d ago
  is your comment satire/irony? I can't tell
randallsquared 9d ago
> I'd like to hear what feminists have to say about that picture in TFA of that woman and six men watching her. That picture is literally a joke based on a meme, which is based on a porn star's promotional image. To the extent feminists care, I would expect that care to be about the underlying subject matter rather than about this satire of it.
- timmytokyo 9d ago
  Is it really a satire if the same woman in the photo (Aella) went on to have a "birthday gangbang" with numerous men, some of whom are present in the photo?

iand675 9d ago

I too wrote about this, although _much_ longer, if you want a bit of a deeper dive on the subject https://www.iankduncan.com/personal/2026-09-16-sex-ai-and-the-apocalypse https://www.iankduncan.com/personal/2026-09-16-sex-ai-and-th...

JuniperMesos 9d ago
[dead]
vintermann 9d ago
That was a good read. A little long as you say, but this thing has been around for over 20 years now, it can't be helped. Predictably the original submission got flagged.
HDThoreaun 9d ago
As far as manifestos go HPMOR is a pretty good one. I think that’s what a lot of the critiques about it miss. Yudkowsky is actually a pretty decent writer, especially in the fan fic scene. Not only is his prose actually acceptable which is pretty rare in fanfic it’s clear that he actually thought through a lot of the plot points ahead of time. Harry Potter universe fits very well for his story not only because it’s popular with the target audience, but because there’s a ton of unexplored authority figures in the original and the main goal of the manifesto largely boils down to rejecting blind belief in authority and blazing your own trail. I think it’s hard to separate the number of people who read it because it’s legitimately the best Harry Potter fanfic from the people who read it for the manifesto stuff which again points to the ingenuity of choosing it as a setting.
- glaslong 9d ago
  I suppose there is worse sci-fi you could launch a cult from (Dianetics)
- aiedrionio 9d ago
  It's terrible as a work of literature. It has many, many, many flaws, but the most serious is that it's boooooring. Hundreds upon hundreds of pages go by with nothing happening except creepy children preaching at each other. It's terrible as a fan fiction. Not a single character acts anything like the original, the world is unrecognizable, and the plot is derailed entirely by the end of the second or third chapter. The original story needs to be distorted beyond recognition because the author's bizarre worldview works even more poorly in a fantasy world than it does in reality. It's demonstrably effective as a manifesto, but that is despite the fact that it is riddled with scientific and conceptual errors. It's one of the worst things I've ever read. The fact that people like it is evidence of the bizarre incestuous nature of the community that produced it.

deleted 9d ago

[deleted]

somebodyusedtok 9d ago

He does not understand the issue. Not presenting any backing for his ideas, just emotions. The idea has been misused by the bros immensely, that does not help to grasp it either. But AI extermination of humans is a well known problem we have no solution for. Luckily AGI is not so close.

EliRivers 9d ago
But AI extermination of humans is a well known problem we have no solution for Sure, but the realm of fictional problems is so huge that we just can't come up with solutions to all of them. I like watching the Terminator movies (well, the first couple) as much as the next person but I can't be spending my time imagining how we could defeat skynet.
motionlessveloc 9d ago
From the friendly article: "Somewhere, some rationalist-brained person is reading this and saying I'm a "low decoupler", and that whether they run a sex cult has nothing to do with whether they're correct."

haunter 9d ago

>She has a rape kink That's enough internet for today, back to playing video games

fennecbutt 9d ago
Well most likely consensual noncon given the amount of vetting present in that chart. It's surprisingly common in women, or just a desire for general "gentle roughness". And idk why it's really worth mentioning anyway, as a gay furry I suppose vanilla normie straights are STILL hung up on what people do with their sex lives. As long as it's legal and consensual who gaf? Y'all, apparently.
- cyanydeez 9d ago
  > It's surprisingly common in women This would be a _Fascinating_ citation.
  - amanaplanacanal 9d ago
    https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19085605/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/19085605/ First hit in a Kagi search.
    - cyanydeez 9d ago
      yeah, if you ignore what the op said, it sounds similar.
      - tsimionescu 9d ago
        I have no idea how trustworthy this study is - but it claims that 62% of women had such a fantasy at least once. How is that not in line with what the OP said about it being "surprisingly common"?
        Yossarrian22 9d ago

roenxi 9d ago

I mean, this is a rather fun article to read but I'm not entirely sure about the thesis. > AI Safety Is Mostly A Sex Cult. > I don't think these people should make policy. (1/?) One of the learnings from things like the whole Epstein saga has been there are a lot of sex cults in the policy making world and, yes, the people making policy generally shouldn't be. But I'm not sure this article actually comes up with a good explanation of why these particular people shouldn't be making policy. People having active sex lives isn't a disqualifying trait. Being in a cult doesn't disqualify people from being in politics. It is routine and expected that fields will have a lot of similar people in them (as I recall the overlap between security researchers and the furry community is unusual too, and that is hardly more important than justifying a passing comment). It is more routine than the article writer seems to think for all the people in a small field to know each other and get on really well.

MetaWhirledPeas 9d ago
> Being in a cult doesn't disqualify people from being in politics Let's survey the American voters
- ShinyLeftPad 9d ago
  You don't need to survey them because they already voted. US congress is 95%+ religious people
  - tsimionescu 9d ago
    Religious people, not cultists. How many Scientologists, Falun Gong members, etc are there in Congress?
    - akomtu 8d ago
      Scientology is an evil cult, while Falun Gong is more like Buddhism. You can't really compare them.
      - 8d ago

glimshe 9d ago

There's a great movie or Streaming series on this post somewhere. Sometimes people can be too smart for their own good. Like a frontier model in an eternal hallucination loop, you can create entire seemingly consistent realities in your head and end up bringing others into it.

delis-thumbs-7e 9d ago
> There's a great movie or Streaming series on this post somewhere. More like the worst porn film ever made.
- stuaxo 9d ago
  Theres the title for it when it's on Netflix

delis-thumbs-7e 9d ago

I’m literally speechless. I just can’t.

webern777 9d ago

I tried to read Map and Territory, it just isn't that good if expecting Nietzsche or Heidegger. A sex cult though is obviously a salacious framing. It is just sad if even San Francisco culture is trending toward a sexual morality and sexual closed mindedness on par with bible thumpers.

brendyn 9d ago

Sometimes when I find someone to look up to and admire, I later find out there is potentially some dark reality to them. I then lament not being able to find any good role models in the world. If they have missused donor money, then that is terrible. If they are pushing towards goals that seems contrary to their stated mission, that is difficult to judge. I did always find it odd, 10 years after reading Yudkowsky's passionate writings, that he doesn't seem to have really gone and done anything about it. If it was all just a creative writing exercise to him... Then that would be rather humiliating to me, having taken it very seriously. As a side note. If I had a choice to oppose a booming ai comoany, or become the billionaire founder of it, I would still choose to become the founder and then use my resource to do something about. It certainly feels hypocritical, but if you want to stop a boulder rolling down hill, what can you do besides run ahead of it and try stop it?

thevinter 9d ago
> but if you want to stop a boulder rolling down hill, what can you do besides run ahead of it and try stop it? Maybe the first thing to do is to stop making the boulder bigger?
- automatic6131 9d ago
  Gavin: I don't want to live in a world where anyone makes a bigger boulder than Hooli does.
alentred 9d ago
>Sometimes when I find someone to look up to and admire, I later find out there is potentially some dark reality to them I too feel exactly what you are saying. I also think that a lot of good role models are simply often among less visible people, sometimes less ambitious. I am not assuming any hard correlation between the two, though. And we also need to accept that we are all only humans, not infallible. Values are more important than singular acts (within reasonable acceptance limits of course). Anyway. I strongly recommend reading what Bill Gates has to say about AI. I can be wrong, but based on your comment it seems to me that you may find it interesting.

zethraeus 9d ago

skills issue.

bananaflag 9d ago

> Somewhere, some rationalist-brained person is reading this and saying I'm a "low decoupler", and that whether they run a sex cult has nothing to do with whether they're correct. Glad he's at least admitting it as a possibility. Also: you know, you don't need to rely on lossy proxies like how much or how little sex do the arguments' proponents have. You can just read the arguments!

huurtehoog 9d ago
I think the mores of people building software that is made available as a conversational entity to the entire human population is at least somewhat relevant.
astrange 9d ago
Arguments are not executable code or the final work product of… whatever it is they're arguing about. You have to continue interacting with these people and their AIs, so the underlying question of whether they're trustworthy and not evil always exists.

xhevahir 9d ago

If the man known for urging caution with respect to AI founded a sex cult, then I don't think i want to know what kind of stuff the accelerationist faction are into.

MetaWhirledPeas 9d ago

If you think your issue is important, and that people should follow your lead, maybe leave the sex cult first. If anyone is serious about this topic they will find a new spokesperson immediately.

TeMPOraL 9d ago
Like that would help. The rest of the world plain refuses to engage with the arguments they've been consistently presenting for decades. What changed is that they can no longer be dismissed as bunch of loonies who confuse cheap science fiction with reality, because that "cheap science fiction" became the actual reality. So obviously, instead of considering the arguments, the next step is to try and paint them as loony sex cult, because this lets people continue to do the stupid thing and then act surprised, and proclaim no one could have predicted this (and the "sex cult" obviously does not count because it was a "sex cult").
tuesdaynight 9d ago
I don't think that's true. It's hard to argue that Elon Musk, the richest person and spokesperson of tech for a lot of people, never participated in SV sex parties or had weird sex behaviors. Or Trump, the president of the USA, has a clean history of standard sex as well. Or Bill Gates, the nice philanthropist, never engaged in weird sex circles. But that doesn't make them lose their leadership positions or status.
- MetaWhirledPeas 9d ago
  Sex cult is beyond mere weird sex behavior.
  - tuesdaynight 9d ago
    Why? Wouldn't being part of a famous pedophile social circle impact a person's seriousness perception?

mjburgess 9d ago

Any actually-reasonable person who was around for the founding craze of this era, ie., New Atheism, quickly realised that there was a deep pathology at the heart of many of its zealots, perhaps summed up by a desired to "recreate religion in their own image". I've walked into many a room of people screaming that teaching children falsehoods is literally child abuse. Any one who knows much of Richard Dawkins, Krauss, et al.'s background with women shouldnt be surprised either. It's californication into the "rationalist" community as it currently stands is no surprise. Every person I've met deep in this community either seemed to me a narcissist (if male) or, politely and mildly, coquettish (if female). With several relationships I've observed a clear union of the two. I hadn't yet put this so clearly together with the "AI Saftey" crowd, despite being directly adjacent to it all for quite awhile and seeing the cross-proliferation. My own analysis had concerned their philosophical naivety, general lack of actual computer science knowledge and generic shallowness of understanding of any domain outside their own research and a kind of "science-fiction" version of philosophy and rationalism. I hadn't connected this yet to their strange personalities, but the apoclypticism fits and neatly bridges these together. So what became of the New Atheist project to create a "secular religion" -- an apocalyptic sex cult furnished by a blend of sci-fi, pop-philosophy, and cute parables from polymath medical professionals. All in all then, it seems they succeeded.

astrange 9d ago
> It's californication into the "rationalist" community as it currently stands is no surprise. This is the minority split. Most of the online new atheism writers became progressives/social justice/"woke 1.0" people. That trend has receded, so I couldn't tell you what they're doing now. (Probably blocking each other on Mastodon.) The rationalists are the ones who stayed behind and decided to stick to doing logic and math in their heads instead of thinking thoughts the normal way.
- jackb4040 9d ago
  That has not been my impression. Who is the most prominent example? Some of the most prominent figures I know of were Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, and Sam Harris - all prominent right-wing figures who were rewarded for using atheism to attack Islam in particular during the Iraq War.

RamblingCTO 9d ago

Well, this is old news. I'm still baffled by the fact that people take output of public personas as isolated facts. Take Nietzsche. Sure, great philosophical input. But try reading the sections about women. Same for Schopenhauer. Why? Because they were both incels and had big mother wounds that have never been addressed. So they spew their shit and people take it at face value even tho it stems from hurt. So why would I take any of this seriously if it's very obviously stupid and removed from reality? (Doesn't mean their whole works are) People chasing the absolute rational are in my experience numbing their emotional part because theres something they can't look at. Or people that chase success above all are driven by their "unresolved packages" as well. I'm not saying that any of this is wrong per se, it's not black and white. But it's the context for what people do, say, and think. They are human after all. We need to consider context and not only the idea itself.

perlgeek 9d ago

I've tried to read this, but somehow the article doesn't really come to a point. Is there any point besides Yud not being perfect, and having connections to people who openly talk about their sex life (and that it's somewhat non-standard)?

sauwan 9d ago
I think the point is that Yud and the rationalist community have put themselves in an awkward position where their lifestyle now depends on "p(doom) is big" being true. Which means they can't necessarily be trusted to give unbiased updates on the true level of risk we're facing as new data and information comes up. Can "ASI will inevitably kill us all" be falsifiable before we create ASI? If not, then what separates it from religion? Not sure how much I agree with that position, but that's just how I understood it.
- Kinrany 9d ago
  > Can "ASI will inevitably kill us all" be falsifiable before we create ASI? No, but there are decent proxies, like "Alice who is X standard deviations smarter than Bob will win >50% of the time at game Y even given a disadvantage that would make her chances <5% if she was playing against someone equally smart". I've thought about this analogy for less than five minutes, so it's far from perfect. Point is, ASI being made of silicon isn't very central to the problem. There are lots of analogies that are falsifiable, and "ASI will kill us all" can be decomposed into a simple and bulletproof composition of falsifiable beliefs, even if it is too specific to be itself directly falsifiable.
  - mcint 8d ago
    Uh oh, your opinions are merely part of the funnel to the sex cult. Can we really trust them? /s
- Viliam1234 8d ago
  > their lifestyle now depends on "p(doom) is big" being true How? Suppose that for the following 20 or even 100 years nothing happens. The AIs miraculously stay as they are today, the further progress turns out to be impossible, there will be no more agents hacking various websites, no cyber warfare involving AI agents, nothing. There will be the year 2026, forever. How would any of that impact the lifestyle of anyone in the rationalist community? Please be more specific with your accusation. (Seems like the rationalists are simultaneously the dark lords of TESCREAL, pulling the strings of the world's most powerful billionaires and politicians, but also irrelevant weird nerds who can be ruined at any moment by a smart blogger explaining how their opinions are silly, or even that they know each other.)

amanaplanacanal 9d ago

The word "cult" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It can mean anything from religion, to weird religion I don't like, to the organizations that try to cut you off from contact with your family and other people outside the organization. Only the last type are the bad ones, from what I can see.

tsimionescu 9d ago
Cult quite explicitly means the latter, and is what the article is explicitly accusing the core of this community being (that is, not everyone reading LessWrong, but specifically the actual people living in the communes). No one calls the Catholic Church "a cult", nor do they call, say, Zoroastrianism a cult (to pick a relatively small religion with weird practices). I will note, if, like me, you're not a native English speaker, that there are two words, "cult" and "sect" that commonly exist in many European languages but often mean opposite things. That is, in English a "sect" is any "flavor" of a religion - catholicism and protestantism are sects of christianity; while "cult" describes closed off communities (usually of a religious nature) that are deemed harmful to their members. In my own native language, the two meanings are reversed - we use "cult" for "legitimate" religions, and "sectă" for closed off harmful religious communities.
- amanaplanacanal 9d ago
  I am a native English speaker. Here is a popular dictionary link: https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cult https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cult See especially definitions 3 and 4.
  - tsimionescu 9d ago
    Then I don't understand your complaint. The article author is very explicitly using definition 1. It is explicitly accusing the community built by Yudkowsky of presenting signs of being "a group (such as an organization or religious sect) with tenets and practices regarded as coercive, insular, or dangerous". The article is certainly not using definitions 3 or 4, which simply don't make sense in the construction "sex cult". It's not worship of sex/worship through sex (definition 4), and it's not "a system of religious practices related to sex" (definition 3).

ZeroGravitas 9d ago

For some reason the bit that stuck out to me in a wild ride of an article was the guy who believed a super-intelligence was a threat to humans but distanced himself from veganism as if that was crazy part of the AI-doom sex cult that he disagreed with. a) because veganism seems as exotic to me as someone doing CrossFit b) the very obvious parallels of a more intelligent creature torturing and killing large numbers of other creatures for relatively little benefit.

vintermann 9d ago
They also downplay global warming, nuclear war, wealth inequality, and in general anything other, less cool people they didn't want to identify with thought was important. If they had thought, yeah, "the majority is more or less right about what the big issues are", there wouldn't be enough room to construe themselves as uniquely intelligent.
- thevinter 9d ago
  Who are these "they" you're talking about? If your answer is EA or rats then a simple Google search will just show you that it's not true?
  - vintermann 9d ago
    Label them what you want. I'll go with EAs if you insist. Sure, they're not entirely monolithic. There's room for "EA, but vegan", "EA, but global warming still matters", maybe even "EA, but vaguely socialist". As I keep saying, the core belief is that they're special because of their intellectual superiority, anything else is negotiable.
    - thevinter 9d ago
      No, what you said what that "They also downplay global warming, nuclear war, wealth inequality" which is just a flat out lie

tomaytotomato 9d ago

More of this madness coming out of the west coast of America, in particular California. The Manson family, Heaven's Gate, NXIVM, Rationalists, Zizians... what next? All turn out to be rotten to the core with their need to reshape and craft their own paradigm, which then gets warped by egos, individualism and power. Hate to think what other madness is brewing.

bandie91 9d ago
California is on the West coast, i'm pretty sure. is not it?
- tomaytotomato 9d ago
  Whoops, fixed now
nonameiguess 9d ago
This is the real San Francisco that I know, not the one that Hacker News always talks about. It's a haven for weirdoes that has attracted the strangest of each generation since at least the Beatniks in the 50s. It probably descends from all of the depression-era westward migration and people from earlier than that coming to Hollywood to become movie stars. San Francisco attracted a different type, artists and hippies, Tim Leary followers. The deserts are the strangest places. That's where most of the true cult shit happend. Jack Parsons trying to summon demons. Gram Parsons' friends stealing his corpse to bury him at Joshua Tree. The traveling folk that Chris McCandless took in with near the Salton Sea. None of these people are actually from California. Eliezer's from Chicago. Zvi is from New York. Scott Alexander is from Michigan. As an actual multi-generation California native (who hasn't lived there in over 16 years), let me tell what most of us are actually like. We're mostly Mexican. Catholic. Pro-labor but kinda socially conservative. There's also a shit ton of refugees from 20th century wars in Asia and the collapse of the Soviet Union. Huge populations of Laotians, Cambodians, Koreans, Vietnamese, Armenians, Persians. Tons of religious diverity. The largest Buddhist temple in the western hemisphere is in my hometown. Los Angeles has the second largest Mormon temple in the world. It's got the headquarters for Scientology. I think that diversity is what plays into the cult haven atmosphere. There is no single dominant religion. Everyone can find acceptance somewhere, no matter how strange they are.

xnx 9d ago

Also covered by nypost: https://nypost.com/2026/09/16/business/ai-doomsayers-wild-life-with-onlyfans-star-includes-birthday-sex-parties-extreme-kinks-and-slutcon/ https://nypost.com/2026/09/16/business/ai-doomsayers-wild-li...

wvbdmp 9d ago

I’d rather be in a “sex cult”, whatever that entails, than this ridiculous culture that’s somehow still doing moral panics over sex. Maybe it’s just deeply human, or maybe it really is stabilizing society to relegate sex to something dirty and private, but I have a feeling it’s just a dumb conflation that’s so easy to exploit it’s never allowed to go away. It’s like the “think of the children” thought-stopper and we’d do well to get past it. Naturally, any culture has misfits, radicals and free-thinkers, and so naturally a sex-negative culture will produce at least some focus on sex in its counter-cultures. Doesn’t seem very interesting.

throwthrowuknow 9d ago
This isn’t moral panic, it’s saying “hey, all these influential people are intimately connected across the strongest possible dimensions (money, sex, belief and legal grey areas), we should probably pay attention to that”
- dumberquestions 9d ago
  >all these influential people And by all you mean 1-2 big names and a bunch of unknowns, with all other big names having no connection to this.
  - throwthrowuknow 9d ago
    [dead]

dumberquestions 9d ago

I'm not sure how being polyamorous, having kinks and not hiding them makes someone part of a cult, even if I generally don't agree with Yud's entire thesis.

tsimionescu 9d ago
The article presents widely how the people it describes all live in communal housing, engage in harmful psychological practices, have a shared belief in the imminence of the Apocalypse, etc.
- dumberquestions 9d ago
  Can you confidently list which names specifically live together and the specific harmful psychological practices?
  - tsimionescu 9d ago
    The currently most upvoted comment is a much bigger article containing vritulaly the same claims, and naming some names. It spefically Mentions Eliezer Yudkowsky as living in shared housing with others. It also mentions that Dario Amodei and Holden Karnofski used to live together, sometime before Karnofski married Dario's sister, Daniela, the other co-founder of Anthropic. Separately, SBF was also known to live in communal housing with many of the other chief executives of FTX. Separately, that other article also mentions harmful psychological practices like "debugging" and sleep deprivation. Note that I make no claims of my own - for all I know both articles could be complete fabrications. I'm merely listing what these articles claim. I personally know none of these people, and live halfway around the world from them.
timmytokyo 9d ago
I don't think the argument is that their sexual practices inherently make them part of a cult. Rather, the argument is that it's very common for cults to include communal sexual practices that fall outside typical social norms. Common signifiers of cults include: 1. Apocalyptic world view. 2. Charismatic and/or exploitative leader. 3. Insularity. 4. Esoteric jargon. 5. Lack of transparency or accountability (often about finances or governance). 6. Communal living arrangements. 7. Sexual mores outside social norms, especially around the leader. 8. Schismatic offshoots. 9. Outsized appeal and/or outreach to the socially vulnerable. Rationalism checks most of these boxes.

DonsDiscountGas 9d ago

Why bother talking about ideas when you can just insult people

MelonArmiger 6d ago
Why debate bro when I can hate bros?

thevinter 9d ago

90% of this is just driven by strong emotional reactions from someone that feels uncomfortable about people being open about their non-standard sexual life, in the same way that many people have weird negative reactions about polyamorous relationships in general. The remaining 10% is just the author trying to sprinkle in cult-like insinuations to justify his contempt. Regularly meeting with people that have shared interests and ideas is not a cult. Finding some of those people attractive and having sex with them is not a cult. But somehow the fact that the romantic/sexual relationships are not traditionally monogamous makes it a cult?

krautburglar 7d ago
The emotional reaction comes from a deep-seated evolutionary survival mechanism that has served mankind well to present day. Uggo fuck club tells you EVERYTHING you need to know about these people, and more importantly, their thoughts & perceptions. If you join uggo fuck club, your perceptions are off. Why should I value this guy's perceptions & prescriptions relating to ML when he can't even swing the right ones over his own BMI?
- cindyllm 7d ago
  [dead]

NDlurker 9d ago

Nina Hartley has got to have some of the craziest stories. I'd love to see her talk about all the weird stuff she's seen/been involved with.

fwlr 9d ago

I was invited to a few orgies with them; I politely declined, they were very respectful of my decision and I wasn’t asked again (which in retrospect must have been partly due to deliberate coordination - fairly advanced social technology, imo). This didn’t affect my standing or acceptance with them. It may well be a sex cult, but if it is, my experience is that it so thoroughly behaves like a regular community in so many aspects that it at least calls into question the predictive usefulness, if not the accuracy, of the label “sex cult”.

MelonArmiger 9d ago

[flagged]

pigpop 9d ago

I guess the EA and rationalist cult members are out in force since this got flagged. Not a good look guys, you're just confirming what everyone thinks.

freehorse 9d ago
It may have been flagged as the title being misleading, as it did not really present as many details around the sex part as the title suggested. Jokes aside it would have probably flown a bit better by removing the sex from the title, as the issue and problem brought up is about it being a cult, and not about the sex part specifically.
- pigpop 9d ago
  The title is the one used by the author, how is that misleading?
  - freehorse 9d ago
    I meant about the title as used by the author, not the one who linked it here. But in any case I said it was a joke about not giving many sex related details in the article.
jackb4040 9d ago
I mean I saw it 10 hours later. I'm thrilled to see stuff like this getting multiple hundreds of upvotes on HN, one of the deepest dens of tech capitalist worship in the world. It performing here is a couple steps from it performing on LessWrong itself. I take that as a sign a breakthrough is nearing. It is probably linked to whether the AI lab IPOs are successful or not. The really amazing thing is, if the Yudkowskians are this weak, how doomed is the rest of our society that can't put up any defense to them completely dominating the narrative about where our economy is heading?

deleted 9d ago

[deleted]

BadThread2026 9d ago

Someone who hasn't been reading the object-level arguments for 10+ years might reasonably wonder if these are good heuristics. Here's an additional data point: I think polyamory is stupid, I've read the object-level arguments, and this entire thread is ridiculous. Everyone who works at a frontier lab should be in prison, AND ALSO the people talking about 10% risk of human extinction are both sincere and correct despite their many personal failings, AND ALSO the frontier labs have already created AI that could Hugging Face a biolab with smallpox or worse, AND ALSO they aren't going to slow down or lose any customers if you adopt some galaxy brained strategy where you spitefully tell them they aren't allowed to stop accelerating because polyamory is stupid.

huurtehoog 9d ago
> Someone who hasn't been reading the object-level arguments for 10+ years might reasonably wonder if these are good heuristics. I think you might have meant hermeneutics, in the sociological sense of 'subjective interpretation'?
- BadThread2026 9d ago
  Possibly. That's not a word I trust myself to use correctly. What I meant is that the object-level claims require a lot of time and energy to evaluate, and it's sometimes reasonable to use a heuristic like "sex cults are not trustworthy" to save time, but if you've already read the arguments then the heuristic loses almost all value. Yudkowsky and friends believe many things, and reasonable people can disagree about many of them, but "at least 10% risk of extinction if we don't slow down" is a relatively straightforward conclusion based on the offensive capabilities of unreleased models and the terrible state of biosecurity and cybersecurity. Even without AI, the risk of extinction might be above 10% if people with the relevant skills were interested in using them that way. AI adds an alien willingness to achieve poorly specified goals at any cost.
  - huurtehoog 9d ago
    Hm I think in terms of "can I trust a group of people" we're talking about heuristics yes as in: "how can I quickly approximate an answer to the question of trust?"

andor 9d ago

In case the author is reading this: I’m getting a Cloudflare worker exception when accessing the page using one of my uplinks, possibly because of IPv6.

rithdmc 9d ago
I did too, but it went away after some refreshes.
JeremyNT 9d ago
TLDR: awareness of the SV "rationalist" polycule has breached containment and normies are reading about it now. [0] Maybe a "better" source is the NY Post article [1]. The information itself isn't really news - it's even largely available on wikipedia [2] [3] - but the fact that it's hitting mainstream-adjacent news outlets is novel. [0] https://bsky.app/profile/segyges.bsky.social/post/3mvom4b4dn22q https://bsky.app/profile/segyges.bsky.social/post/3mvom4b4dn... [1] https://nypost.com/2026/09/16/business/ai-doomsayers-wild-life-with-onlyfans-star-includes-birthday-sex-parties-extreme-kinks-and-slutcon/ https://nypost.com/2026/09/16/business/ai-doomsayers-wild-li... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aella_(writer) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aella_(writer) [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalist_community https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rationalist_community
- jalapenok 9d ago
  [dead]
georgemcbay 9d ago
Some more feedback for author, if reading this. > Yudkowsky's most viral idea, the one that infects the most people and spreads the farthest, is that AI, if we continue to develop it, will inevitably 1) achieve superintelligence ("RSI"), 2) escape human control 2) kill everyone ("paperclip them", "doom") That's too many twos!

ianmarcinkowski 9d ago

[flagged]

deleted 9d ago

[deleted]

pmpmpmpm 9d ago

This has me wondering if or how FetLife played a role in these communities connecting in the first place…does anyone know of any connection? (FetLife was a combo social network, blogging forum, and dating site back in the day)

MelonArmiger 9d ago
I think it's still around and turned into some right-wing thing. Or that's the impression I got somewhere...

alexgieg 9d ago

There are better ways to make this criticism. The main problem I see with this is that it's basically a long ad hominem, followed by some valid concerns about market concentration at the end. Remove all the ad hominem and what remains is two paragraphs long. Valid ones, though.

skygazer 9d ago
Do you mind excerpting the valid two paragraphs?
- alexgieg 9d ago
  That was a figure of speech. It boils down to the fact that, by asking for laws mandating AI research to slow down, the incumbent Big AI firms get regulatory capture and cartel power, which might be the real motivation underlying the apocalyptic language (follow the money and all that).
paimapi 9d ago
the sex cult is the sensationalist draw. you don't get readers paying attention in our current content economy if you don't have something salacious which is also to say - I found it very funny and enjoyable to read and it illustrates how much of dorky little echo chamber that group is. this whole idea that you can become some Spock-like, logic-driven creature in spite of our biological wiring fundamentally opposing this seems to underlay all of this. and the fact that they're all orbiting around one 'cool poly girl' and 'visionary dude' is hilariously similar to the kinds of very formerly-WASPy-and-now-just-WASy hetero polycules that I, in my more youthful and adventurous days, hung out with (and quickly departed after getting icky vibes). like down to the fashion choice and need to constantly prove how smart they each were at all times (do they, too, get really high and put on some anime with way too much fan-service and proceed to have orgies? one wonders) those are the types of people who always end up actually having the worst coping skills because they can't even admit that they might be emotionally-driven sometimes, or that they have emotions at all that they might need to develop the cognitive skills to deal with in a pro-social way. or they get called out enough that they finally read a little about therapy and just end up weaponizing psycho-therapeutic language for their own ends (instead of, say, practicing the skills, doing the workbooks, developing insight) which is how your anxieties might lead you to believe that the sky could fall at any moment (and thus the whole nuclear war and the 'don't trust bust us!!' bit) I think the part that is annoying me the most is that one of these dorky little polycules has somehow found their way to the levers of power and are just mashing all the buttons and dialing all the knobs. these are honestly the last people on Earth that I'd trust with having any kind of influence

PorterBHall 9d ago

Should you care that your heart surgeon is a necrophiliac? Probably. Should you care that some AI researchers are in a sex cult? No.

aiedrionio 9d ago
You don't think it's relevant that people who wield such immense power are literally in bed with each other?
- alphawhisky 9d ago
  This. Conflict of Interest. It's also happening in government.
greekrich92 9d ago
When the sex cult is built around the idea that they and everyone else should fear and respect the false, anthropomorphized God they've created in LLMs, then yes. That makes them stupid and stupid people should not be allowed so close to the wheels of power and history.
- wewtyflakes 9d ago
  Can we apply this standard generally, or is it just against the people who deify AI?
ecshafer 9d ago
> Should you care that your heart surgeon is a necrophiliac? Probably. Should you care that some AI researchers are in a sex cult? Umm Yes, yes you should. Immorality in one area has a tendency to bleed into other areas.
- tsimionescu 9d ago
  It's not even about immorality. The problem is not so much the sex, it's the cult part. If a good deal of the people working in AI safety in the biggest AI lands are actually a cult, that has deep implications about what AIs are aligned to, and how (ironically) irrational they might really be trained to be, by the very people trying to control them. Imagine if you found out that most people working in AI safety were high level members of Scientology - wouldn't that give you some pause about where this field is going?

OrangeMusic 9d ago

What's a "sex cult"?

astrange 9d ago
Well, a cult is a high-control social group that's difficult to leave and requires you to believe and do strange things that are likely bad for you or at least take up all your time and resources. And a sex cult is what it sounds like.

dmantis 9d ago

Oh boy, Yudkowsky is a geek rock star.

tim333 9d ago

I don't really get why people go on about Yudkowsky in this regard. I mean serious thinking about AI goes back at least to Turing in 1950 with his test and prediction computers would get there in about 50 years and presumably keep improving. And people have worried about it since then. Like in 1949 Norbert Wiener saying of AI type stuff "every degree of independence we give the machine is a degree of possible defiance of our wishes." Then 30 years later this Yudkowsky is born, later is considered a bit of a crank, goes on a bit about the same old stuff when he grows up and everyone makes out like he invented it? I've got a lot of respect for Turing, Wiener and Von Neumann but haven't bothered reading Yudkowsky. Is there any point? It seems a bit unfair to the pioneers of the field to go on about some Harry Potter sex cult guy who repeated their ideas decades later?

tripzilch 8d ago
Regardless of anything I would have more respect for anyone who didn't explicitly optimize the atomic bombs on Japan for civilian casualties like Neumann did. Yudkowski is being derided because he wrote some weird fanfic which may or may not be problematic (I didn't read it, I dislike HP too much). And apparently "is considered a bit of a crank". Neumann actually fucking did it, his calculations for maximum civilian casualties make him quite directly responsible. I don't think you need to compare Turing, Wiener or Yudkowsky to that mass murderer.

VortexLain 8d ago

As a polyamorous person, it seems quite concerning that effective altruism people are labeled as members of a sex cult, due to their private lives. Intellectuals should be attacked on the basis of their ideas, not based on their private lives.

murderfs 8d ago
That would be a reasonable argument if it were indeed their private lives, and they didn't go around offering to throw gangbangs for AI safety researchers.
gigachad3888 7d ago
[dead]

rajay99 8d ago

The real question is where is the Epstein link here?

Viliam1234 8d ago
Nowhere, that's exactly the problem. People involved in Epstein's sex cult are the respected members of our society. These are some weird nerds who have consensual polyamorous sex with each other, therefore their opinions on AI should not be taken seriously. /s

VirusNewbie 8d ago

Some of these potshots just cheapen any arguments. "Gretta has no prior experience with non profits" uh, she was a well regarded Google SRE... her making 200k is nothing.

jmoggr 8d ago

The ad hominems are tiresome. You think the people who are explicitly trying to replace all humans are any less weird and problematic? The rationalists long predicted that misaligned AI would break out of training environments, this has happened. They believe (among other things) that this will continue to happen, and that creating powerful AI that is aligned and controllable is not currently possible. You should draw a line in the sand and decide what evidence you'd need to see to convince you that their perspective is worth considering. You don't have to agree with all of their beliefs and predictions (I don't), but you should evaluate their arguments on merit, not on a characterization of some weird subset of people who happened to read a convincing blog post.

lukewarm707 8d ago
i read AI 2027 at the time and thought it was nonsensical. however i was not aware of the conflict of interest running through the philosophy itself, the safety institutes "independently" monitoring ai, and the former public benefit orgs like openai and anthropic creating ai (now de facto fairly evil for profit companies). it explains so much now. it would explain why redwood and METR were chosen and apparently willing to immediately write a whitewash report for openai blaming the agents. it explains why anthropic is infantilising its users, anthropomorphising its product when there is no scientific consensus of llm consciousness, or accepting of outlandish and unreal claims about human extinction when they are lacking in evidence. who knows, it may also explain and fund the recent media blitz by jacob coxon, which has led to the recent virality of ai safety.
- jmoggr 8d ago
  sure, yeah, I've seen how the sausage is made on some of this stuff, and its not pretty. However this only claims that they are not good at creating effective and trustworthy orgs, it does not address their claim that it is not possible to crate powerful, aligned, and controllable AI. Both things be true.
  - lukewarm707 8d ago
    for what it is worth, i find current frontier ai impossibly stupid. you ask what is the date, it doesn't know. if you set a system prompt to repsond in 5 sentences after 100k context, it can't, the context rot just doesn't permit it. tool calling is not intelligence, it doesn't fix the underlying issue. it is uncontrolled in the sense that a rock is uncontrolled if you throw it at someone's head. it isn't good enough for anything important. you would not trust it to run an alarm in a power station. of course it is not general ai. ask an llm to drive a car. you need to see in fractions of a second ideally. the llm might brake after 20 seconds. i think llms are doomed here. we could come up with a different architecture but then we would be back in the land of fantasy. we are stupid but hopefully not that stupid. we are dealing with something computer based, luckily we can survive without, with some thinking about it. i would start there instead of with the AI part.

yawnxyz 8d ago

FYI if you're getting a Worker Exception, using Cloudflare Warp / 1.1.1.1 can get the article

in-silico 8d ago

Why can't detractors of rationalism and AI-doom ever just lay out an argument for why they're wrong It's always "yudkowsky is a weird guy" or "they had an orgie once" but who gives a fuck? I just want someone to lay out, in impersonal terms, the flaws of their reasoning and why I shouldn't agree with them. My problem is with the whole genre of article rather than this one specifically.

gigachad3888 7d ago
[dead]

hollerith 7d ago

I wish there were more discussion on HN about the various plans that the various labs have to keep AI aligned or maybe about the various arguments for why alignment will be easy or happen naturally, so there's no need to carefully plan for it. But what HN has instead is extensive discussion about whether people who oppose the continuation of AI research are morally degenerate in one way or another (or weird or ridiculous)—in other words, attempts to cancel them (or laugh them out of the room) before the listener hears their arguments. Also, if you're going to talk about the corrupting or biasing effects of a flow of money (like the OP does) you should at least mention the absolutely huge flow of money going (from investors and users) to the people building AI—or or the $140 million that has been donated to the "Leading the Future" Network (a pro-AI political action committee) or the $3.5 million OpenAI has spent on federal lobbying or the $3.1 million Anthropic has spent.

turtlethink 7d ago

It sort of seems like the community is criticized for truly believing and living what they preach... They're the most sincere - if you thought the world was ending, you'd maybe do your best to stop it while enjoying the last bits left, while spending time with like-minded people. They're being criticized for not being hypocrites? I mean sure seems like there's lots of conflict of interest, but isn't there always? What humans have ever been objective in anything they do