Bernie Goes Down the X-Risk Rabbithole (with Dr. Nathalie Maréchal), 2026.05.04

Senator Bernie Sanders recently hosted a panel on "The Existential Threat of AI," featuring Future of Life Institute co-founder Max Tegmark and other x-riskers. Dr. Nathalie Maréchal joins Emily and Alex to unpack this latest stop on Bernie's descent into doomerism. We return to the MST3k model with a rare video artifact!

Nathalie Maréchal is a writer, researcher and advocate fighting for democracy and human rights in the age of technofascism. Her latest article, "Tech Policy Is on the Front Line of Fascism vs. Democracy. Pick a Side," is available in Tech Policy Press. She is currently the managing policy director at Northeastern University’s Institute for Information, the Internet, and Democracy.

References:

• "LIVE: The Existential Threat of AI and the Need for International Cooperation"

Fresh AI Hell:

• "The AI Pledge for Humanity" petition
• Richard Dawkins force-femmes a chatbot
• Anthropic claims LLMs have "emotion concepts"
• Palantir wants us all to stop being mean to data centers
• "Optimizing LLM costs by inventing employees again"
• Luxury surveillance cat

Check out future streams on Twitch. Meanwhile, send us any AI Hell you see.

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Emily

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Alex

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• Twitter: @alexhanna

Music by Toby Menon.
Artwork by Naomi Pleasure-Park. 
Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman.

Transcript

Alex Hanna: Welcome, everyone, to Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000, where we seek catharsis in this age of AI hype. We find the worst of it and pop it with the sharpest needles we can find. 

Emily M. Bender: Along the way, we learn to always read the footnotes, and each time we think we've reached peak AI hype, the summit of bullshit mountain, we discover there's worse to come. I'm Emily M. Bender, professor of linguistics at the University of Washington. 

Alex Hanna: And I'm Alex Hanna, director of research for the Distributed AI Research Institute. This is episode 78, which we're recording on May 4th of 2026. 

Emily M. Bender: May the 4th be with us. Our guest this week is Dr. Nathalie Maréchal, a writer, researcher, and advocate fighting for democracy and human rights in the age of techno-fascism. After stints at Ranking Digital Rights and the Center for Democracy and Technology, she is currently the managing policy director at Northeastern University's Institute for Information, the Internet, and Democracy. 

Alex Hanna: Nathalie has a piece out today in Tech Policy Press called "Tech policy is on the front line of fascism versus democracy: pick a side." And we just wanted to note that she's here today sharing her own opinions, not those of her employer. Welcome to the show! 

Nathalie Maréchal: Thank you. Thanks so much for having me. And, happy May 4th, for everyone. For those of you on audio, I am happily wearing my Not Today Clanker T-shirt that I just got last week. Felt like the right, felt like the right shirt for today. 

Emily M. Bender: Wonderful, and we are so excited to have you with us to discuss really a horrifying artifact. And we're gonna be leaning into our Mystery Science Theater 3000 inspiration today, because we're actually looking at a video.

Alex Hanna: Woo-hoo. Excited. Yes, Senator Bernie Sanders hosted an event last week called "The Existential Threat of AI and the Need for International Cooperation." This was a panel that included Max Tegmark and other existential riskers, focusing on the dangers and the all-importance of automation. It's really disappointing to see Bernie just going deeper and deeper into the doomer space. Oof. All right. 

Emily M. Bender: All right. You ready? 

Alex Hanna: As ready as I'm gonna ever be. 

Emily M. Bender: Here is our first clip. 

Video clip of Bernie Sanders: " if AI becomes smarter than human beings, as many scientists believe will happen, the human race could lose control over this technology with catastrophic consequences. In other words, the richest, most powerful people in the world are now building a runaway train with no brakes. They acknowledge that they don't understand how it works, and they don't know where it is heading. That is not just Bernie Sanders talking." 

Emily M. Bender: Oh, but it's so terrible that it is Bernie Sanders talking.

Alex Hanna: Oh. Bernie Sanders, why are you saying... Okay. All right. Initial thoughts on that, Nathalie? 

Nathalie Maréchal: Yeah, so I've been following Bernie's descent into doomerism for a while now, and what seems to have happened is that, he just bought it hook, line, and sinker. He's on board with the whole, AI is going to become conscious if it's not already conscious. It's gonna be this, super sentient, super smart, super wise being, that's going to take over the world and we better ensure that it's nice because if it's nice, then maybe it'll be a benevolent dictator, but probably it won't be, and we're all gonna die somehow. And it's really unfortunate that this guy who's been on the right side of history for so many things and who so many people respect for his long career and advocacy for labor in particular, is just buying into this nonsense. 

Emily M. Bender: Absolutely dreadful. There's a hilarious contribution in the chat already from abstract_tesseract. "Silicon Valley billionaires would never build a train." Which is perfect, but the thing that was getting me in this short clip already is, he said, "Many scientists..." okay, first of all, a lot of those folks aren't doing science anymore, and what about all the scientists out here who are like, "No, that's bullshit"? And then on top of that, he just jumps from, here's this thing that's a possibility, to they're building the train without brakes. He just goes from "it's a possibility that's scary to me," to "this thing is happening and we have to prevent it." 

Alex Hanna: The whole thing is mush. Right after this, he references Yoshua Bengio saying that he's now on the X-risk tip. he talks about Geoff Hinton. Basically goes down the line of the different folks who have really gotten lost in the sauce, and have all this scientific credibility that they're just saying, "All right, we're gonna focus on this now." Which is... it says more about what those people who are very deep in AI research have thought of, rather than the people who are evaluating the actual harms. The thing that's really frustrating with this entire event is that he makes asides about actual harm happening. He talks about data centers, he talks about labor, he talks about some of these things, but then he focuses primarily on the doomerism. And I'm just like, "What went wrong?" This is, your whole bag now? Like, how did your policy thinking change so rapidly on this? 

Nathalie Maréchal: Yeah, I don't know. I've been asking around. I live in DC. I'm pretty well-connected in policy and politics circles. I've been asking around to try to figure out what happened, and no one seems to know, other than just, at some point he became convinced that the doomers were right, and that this was the thing to focus on, never mind, like you said, the overwhelming scientific consensus that this actually is cuckoo, or his long and correct focus on labor and labor rights and labor exploitation, and the ways in which the political project behind the AI industry is one that's really about replacing labor and eliminating labor as a class, and therefore eliminating the economic argument in favor of labor rights, right? he did a press conference with a bunch of labor leaders a few weeks ago that I went to. And the event was really on point. I was actually really impressed by the, labor leaders, especially coming from the nurses' union, a few different teachers' unions, the flight attendants' union, really nailed it. Auto workers were there too. And he had a few doomer shibboleths in his opening statements that definitely made me raise my eyebrows. But other than that, he was really on point with, this is about immiseration. This is about completely gutting not just the middle class, but labor as a concept and as an economic and political force. But then you hear this nonsense, and it's like, "Bro, where's your brain?"

Emily M. Bender: Definitely. I guess the siren call of "you can be the hero that saves all of humanity" worked even on Bernie, which is disappointing.

Alex Hanna: Yeah. Just because you've had some good policy positions before doesn't mean you are immune to going deep into it. 

Emily M. Bender: So should we do the next bit? 

Alex Hanna: Yeah. So this is still Bernie, and he is talking about what's happening in government.

Video clip of Bernie Sanders: "Given the fact that leading scientists all over the world are telling us about the existential threat posed by AI, one might think that the United States government and governments all over the world would make this a top priority. One might think that given the risk of extinction that people are talking about-" 

Emily M. Bender: Wait a minute. Was that scare quotes? 

Alex Hanna: The risk of ex- Did he make scare quotes? He did. 

Emily M. Bender: He did. He made quotes. I don't know if they were scare quotes. Maybe they were just quotes. 

Nathalie Maréchal: The whole thing is a scare something, so- 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah. All right, let's keep going. 

Video clip of Bernie Sanders: "-there would have been a pause on AI development as we figured out how to make this technology safe, how to make this technology serve humanity, not threaten our very existence. Has that happened? No, it has not. One might think that given the very real threat to humanity, countries might come together to regulate this technology through an international treaty like we did with nuclear weapons at the height of the Cold War. Has that happened? No, it has not. I'm a member of the United States Senate, and I can tell you unequivocally that there has been no serious discussions about this existential threat."

Alex Hanna: All right. So thoughts there? 

Nathalie Maréchal: So you know what's really wild to me is that both in this panel and in a bunch of other discussions like it, the first analogy that doomers reach for is nuclear weapons, right? But there's a few really big differences here. One is that, first of all, nuclear weapons do exist and have been tested, whereas sentient superintelligence, not so much. But the second is that, in conversations about nuclear weapons, there's never any discussion of the nuclear weapons having agency themselves, right? I think everyone involved is very clear that these are decisions that are made by humans, or at least sociotechnical assemblages of technologies, humans, states, et cetera, and that the bombs themselves are objects, really high-tech objects, but that ultimately how many of them are made and what happens to them, how they're used and how, and when, it remains in human hands. Whereas this discourse seems to put all the agency in this completely made-up, future sentient being, completely eliding the responsibility of the people who build it, who deploy it, who make money off of it, who hype it up, et cetera, et cetera. And in some of my writing, I definitely point to really serious threats from the AI industry and its political project. But I try to be very clear that the problem here is people, right? He and the other people on the panel all put the agency and the risk squarely on AI itself, right? And that is what I find really wild. 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah, absolutely. I have a problem also with the international treaty idea, or at least the analogy to nuclear weapons, because there were governments making promises to each other about government actions. And here, even if you live in their world, you would be making promises to each other about how you would regulate what non-government actors are doing. Which is just, but that's also- and that's the second step, because you're absolutely right, Nathalie, that the discourse goes off the rails because it is about something imagined, rather than something real. You wanna add anything, Alex, before we get to the next clip?

Alex Hanna: No, just absolutely batshit. Let's continue. 

Emily M. Bender: All right. Now we get onto Max Tegmark. Hello, Max. 

Video clip of Max Tegmark: "If you want to know what happens if you unleash billions or trillions of vastly smarter than human intelligent agents on the planet, just go down to the Washington Zoo and ask yourself, who's in the cages? Is it the smartest species around or not? We did this experiment with my three-year-old son just the other month, and it was the humans who were in control. And if we just go ahead and do something this foolhardy before figuring out how to control this stuff, we're in a worse position than the Neanderthals were when-" 

Video clip of Bernie Sanders: "What you're telling us, bottom line here, is that we have a lot to worry about."

Video clip of Max Tegmark: "Yes." 

Emily M. Bender: No! 

Nathalie Maréchal: I'm gonna need an emergency Princess Bride GIF here. What? What experiment? What?

Alex Hanna: The experiment is that you go to the zoo and you look at the animals, and you ask if they're smarter than humans. Don't you understand? 

Nathalie Maréchal: That is not an experiment! 

Emily M. Bender: I was like, was he putting his son in a cage? Was that the experiment? 

Alex Hanna: He was putting him in a whole Saw situation. Yeah, no. 

Emily M. Bender: Oh, god. Yeah. 

Nathalie Maréchal: That's grim. 

Emily M. Bender: Can we also talk for a second about how Tegmark doesn't seem to know how to use a microphone? He's blowing into it a lot. It's gross. 

Nathalie Maréchal: When you're blowing that much hot air, it can't be helped.

Emily M. Bender: Ba-dum-tss. Yeah. All right.

Nathalie Maréchal: No, but to the point about Bernie saying, pointing to, "Oh, scientists believe blah, blah, blah," this man doesn't even know what an experiment is and we're calling him a scientist? Come on.

Alex Hanna: Yeah. There's just so much of this that's really frustrating, too, which is putting things, like whether intelligence is a criteria to then become dominated. How humans relate to the natural world. First off, quantifying intelligence is, one thing, already problematic. Not great start. Second off, thinking the criteria to make sure that the conditions of domination are met is that one must be more intelligent than another. I'm like, okay. That's questionable from the start. It just seems like humans wanna do that caging, rather than... 

Emily M. Bender: There's plenty of viruses and bacteria that can take us out, and they certainly interact with the world differently than we do. I don't wanna do comparative intelligence, but- 

Alex Hanna: Yeah, yeah. And it's just such a bizarre thing. And then also, the chat is great, where BoxoMcFoxo says, "He wants chatbots to put him in a cage and call him an animal?" And LozzaHouse goes, "I'm not kink shaming, I'm just kink asking why." 

Emily M. Bender: Also, I am definitely with abstract_tesseract here on, "Imagining the parallel universe in which Bernie looks at Tegmark dead in the eyes and says, 'What the fuck are you talking about?'"

Alex Hanna: Yeah. Gives him the old Jesse Pinkman or the Walter White asking Jesse Pinkman, "What the fuck are you talking about, Jesse?" 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah. All right. 

Nathalie Maréchal: Can we also talk about what a straight up manel this is? Holy cow. 

Alex Hanna: Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's all men, including Bernie. So there's Bernie, Max, David Krueger, and then, apologizes for my pronunciation of the Chinese names, but Xue Lan, and then Zeng Yi, so all men. And all from their respective majoritarian ethno-social groups in their countries. 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah. And I guess we assume we know that about the folks from China. It's not- 

Alex Hanna: Yeah. I mean, it's a bit of an assumption, but yeah. 

Emily M. Bender: All right. Are we ready to hear something from Krueger in answer to a Bernie question? 

Alex Hanna: Yeah. Yes, let's do it. 

Emily M. Bender: Here we go. 

Video clip of Bernie Sanders: "Not all of our viewers tonight are AI scientists. Let's take a step back-" 

Emily M. Bender: Hold on. Arguably, the people on the panel aren't either. 

Alex Hanna: Ey! 

Video clip of Bernie Sanders: "-and help explain to our audience why AI is so powerful. Dr. Krueger and Dr. Zeng, please explain how AI could become independent of human control. In other words, what we're talking about is no longer science fiction. It is a real possibility. How does that happen? Dr. Krueger?" 

Video clip of David Krueger: "The first thing that I think people need to understand about this is that when we're talking about losing control over AI, we're not talking about the chatbots." 

Emily M. Bender: Really? 

Nathalie Maréchal: The goalposts just moved, Emily, while you had your back turned.

Alex Hanna: Oh, let him finish the sentence, too, 'cause it just gets worse.

Video clip of David Krueger: "We're talking about AI agents. We're talking about systems that are autonomous. They're being designed and built that way." 

Emily M. Bender: All right. So what we're talking about is synthetic text extruding machines that you hooked up to other software so that you can have random actions taken in the world. 

Alex Hanna: Yeah, it's effectively the hooks that you gave into it and the type of control you ceded. However, chatbots are still a big part of that, right? 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah, totally. Okay, keep going. 

Video clip of David Krueger: "This is the goal of these AI companies, is to build AI systems that can do everything that people can do. And that means they will have the ability, if they're successful, to behave autonomously over long time frames without any human oversight."

Nathalie Maréchal: Okay, so here we have again this insane fallacy that it is possible to have machines replace everything a human can do or even everything that has economic value. When I think about what I do all day, I don't think there's anything that I do that a computer can, or a bunch of machines can fully do. I mentor people. I negotiate complex relationships and make people feel good about the work that they're doing or the work that other people are doing and help them see things from other people's perspective. I think critical thoughts about the tech industry and try to write them in ways that make sense to different audiences, which means having an understanding of the social world we live in, what people do, what people's priors are, what arguments are going to be persuasive to them, what background knowledge they already have. It's a lot of, getting into the mind of other people and trying to think like, how can I connect with this person? How can I use language to build bridges between what's in my mind and what's in their mind and come somewhere in the middle and have a meaningful exchange there? Sure, I type stuff and produce text, occasionally- more than I enjoy, I submit expense reports. I guess there are some forms of technology that people call AI that are useful in that endeavor. I upload a receipt, and some piece of software that the company that handles our finances calls AI and puts a cute little emoji next to, says is AI, it figures out the name of the restaurant I went to and how much I spent on it and the date, and so I have to type seven fewer things.

Emily M. Bender: Sure. Oh, you mean optical character recognition and information extraction. 

Nathalie Maréchal: That's fine. But, no, this idea that we can just replace labor wholesale with technologies is, to me, the heart of, at least right now, this month, what Silicon Valley is trying to sell and trying to spin both as a good thing and also something that we should be terrified of, but definitely something that is absolutely happening and that nobody should bother trying to stop because it's gonna happen. But it's both great and terrible. 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah. And not just this month, this has been going on for a while. And one really important thing that you are saying so clearly is that the work that we do is not just the words that we say or write while we're doing that work. 

Alex Hanna: Yeah. And he does make a reference to, a little later, to what the AI companies are doing in this register, that we can talk about when we get to. But yeah, I think it's... Another conceptual move that Krueger is doing too, is he's displacing accountability. He's saying effectively that they're trying to build tools that are going to work autonomously and not to what critical systems that they are being hooked up to or allowed to provide inputs into. And that just is such a weird focus. Why would you focus so centrally on that and displace that accountability to all the different decision-makers that happen all over government and corporates and everything? 

Emily M. Bender: I think part of the insidiousness of this is that he does sound like he's placing some accountability with the tech companies that are building this. And that might have been how they got an in with Bernie. He's like, "We're gonna stick it to these big tech companies, because we have to stop them from doing this really dangerous thing-" where it goes off the rails. 

Alex Hanna: Yeah, for sure. 

Nathalie Maréchal: Yeah, it's the enemy of my enemy is my friend fallacy. 'Cause Bernie knows that the tech is awful, which it is. Firm agree there. And the effective altruists slash doomers are beefing with the tech right. And through the enemy of my enemy is my friend fallacy, that suggests that you should end up being friends. And that's unfortunately something that way too many people in DC are buying into, especially because the effective altruists are currently pouring money and money into congressional primaries, presumably into general elections when we get to there, a whole bunch of fellowships and think tanks and all kinds of stuff. So between the fallacy I mentioned and the motivation, the motivated reasoning because there's money attached to it, it's unfortunately too easy to see how people come to the conclusion that sure, progressives should ally with effective altruists. What could possibly go wrong?

Emily M. Bender: And if you just took a step back and did the follow the money thing, it would be very clear that neither side of this is actually representing the interests of the vast majority of people on the planet.

Nathalie Maréchal: But they think that, they claim that they're representing the interests of billions of people who've never been born yet, and somehow that's the same.

Emily M. Bender: 10 to the 58, in fact. I love that they have this very specific, very ridiculous number. 

Alex Hanna: It's pro-human, don't you know?

Nathalie Maréchal: Pro post-human. 

Emily M. Bender: I just want to think back a little bit. Earlier on, Bernie said something about how this isn't being taken seriously in the Senate. There was Chuck Schumer's ridiculous, what was it, AI forum or something. 

Alex Hanna: Yeah, AI Insight Forums. 

Emily M. Bender: AI Insight Forum. And out of the nine of those, one of them was entirely dedicated to this topic. 

Alex Hanna: Yeah, it was the one we mention in the book. It was, I think, the ninth one, where he asked what everyone's p-doom is. And he had folks from MIRI, the Yudkowsky organization. And they had Stuart Russell, and they had a bunch of... there is attention that is being unfortunately paid to these folks. 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah. All right. Should I get us to the next bit of this? 

Alex Hanna: Yeah.

Video clip of Bernie Sanders: "Please explain your view on creating superintelligence, an artificial mind that exceeds human capabilities. What would it mean for humanity if human beings no longer were the smartest species on the planet?" 

Emily M. Bender: Can we talk for a second about species? 

Alex Hanna: Yeah. Wait, hold on. I think you skipped one. 

Emily M. Bender: Did I? 

Alex Hanna: Yeah, because there's another Tegmark one. 

Emily M. Bender: Oh, okay. Should I- 

Alex Hanna: Don't skip this one because it's funny, and it's- 

Emily M. Bender: Okay. Do you want to go back to Tegmark now, or- ? 

Alex Hanna: Yeah, let's go back to- Why don't we finish this, and then let's go back to Tegmark? 

Emily M. Bender: All right. So Senator Sanders jumping in already with a completely reified definition of ASI, as if that were a real thing. And then referring to, contrastively, the human species versus this other thing. All right, here we go. 

Video clip of David Krueger: "I want to address this and also your question about where this technology is gonna be in 10 or 20 years. I think we should be asking where this technology is gonna be in one or two years. I think right now, the leading AI companies are using AI to write almost all of their code, and they're now using AI to try and automate the research." 

Alex Hanna: Yeah, so okay, one, that's bullshit. Are they saying that they're doing that? What's your evidence here, and what does automate research mean? There's also... 

Emily M. Bender: Just reciting the thing from AI 2027. 

Alex Hanna: Yeah. He's basically doing the AI 2027 thing. This is also something Jack Clark from Anthropic also sent out in his newsletter this morning, which is basically, what was that exact headline? 'Cause I do wanna read it. Let me see where the window was. But it was basically, "oh, they're automating the research now. I didn't think we were gonna get here this quickly." But the headline itself, oh yeah, it was "AI Systems Are About to Start Building Themselves." And it's just like, when I look, and the basis of this is that, "I'm writing this post because when I look at all the publicly available information, I reluctantly come to the view that there's a likely chance," and then just 60% plus. First off, fucking random bullshit number, "that no-human-involved AI R&D, an AI system powerful enough that it could plausibly autonomously build its own successor, happens by the end of 2028. This is a big deal." And I'm just like, this is such bullshit, and this is just like, you're pulling these numbers out of absolutely nowhere. 

Emily M. Bender: And how do we get the policymakers to see how many times these clowns have made ridiculous predictions that then didn't come true? Would that help, Nathalie, do you think?

Nathalie Maréchal: I hope so. I think that's probably persuasive to the staff. The principals themselves, honestly, I don't know. But convincing the staff is the first step to convincing the principals, I think.

Emily M. Bender: All right, should we keep going? We're not done with this clip. 

Alex Hanna: Yeah.

Video clip of David Krueger: "-development of more advanced AI systems in order to reach superintelligence, so that's something vastly smarter than humans, within a couple years. Now, I don't know if they're going to succeed. I think it might take a few more years, like-" 

Emily M. Bender: Really? Hedging his bets on the prediction there. 

Nathalie Maréchal: A rare display of intellectual humility, admitting you don't know something.

Emily M. Bender: Right. But then it's not just two years, it might be five. 

Alex Hanna: The error bars are incredible. Just huge.

Video clip of David Krueger: "-Five, let's say. I would be surprised if it takes 20." 

Emily M. Bender: Wait. I would be surprised if it took 20 years to develop artificial superintelligence too, 'cause I think it's never gonna happen! So I think I agree with him. 

Video clip of David Krueger: "I will say that having been in this field for about a dozen years now, since the beginning of the deep learning revolution when this all kind of kicked off, progress has consistently exceeded expectations. There have always been, the entire time I've been in the field, people saying, 'Oh, yeah, sure, this thing the AI just did, that's impressive, but it's about to hit a wall. It's never gonna be able to do this. It's never gonna be able to do that.' Half the time, that thing that people say it can't do gets solved within a year. The other half of the time, it can already do it." 

Emily M. Bender: All right. Should we talk a little bit about this evaluation practice? 

Nathalie Maréchal: Yeah. Is there any evidence for literally anything that he's saying here?

Alex Hanna: He's pretty much... he's referencing, effectively, the different types of evaluation tests. And the problem with evaluation, and this is also what the Jack Clark newsletter is referring to- it did really well on like SWE-bench, or it did really well on ImageNet classification, or it did really well on these kinds of tests. And that seems to signify that that actually has construct validity for different types of tasks in the real world, when meanwhile, they're these very insular, they're these very problematic test suites. And so it's like, that's effectively the reference here of what they're doing. So for instance, looking at the Jack Clark newsletter, if that was any kind of thing, 'cause he says, "When SWE-bench was launched-" so SWE-bench is a coding test- "it could solve real world GitHub issues." That's what they say. And so it says, "When SWE-bench was launched in late 2023, the best score at the time was Claude 2, which has an overall success rate of 2%. Claude Mythos preview gets 93.9%, effectively saturating the benchmark." And I'm like, but these don't have this external validity. What the fuck?

Emily M. Bender: No. And we have no transparency into the training data. So for all we know, that was in the training data, right? I think that David Krueger would look really good with a citation needed tattoo on his forehead.

Alex Hanna: Yeah, it's really frustrating, and it continues to... The evaluation problem is just completely ridiculous. And there is a piece now, I think I referenced this on a prior podcast, but it's a piece I think that's by Christo Buschek and, oh gosh, now, the second author is Stefan, I believe, Stefan Baack. Who, they are publishing something at FAccT this year, which basically shows how AI benchmarking practice is effectively like, nobody uses new benchmarks. Typically, they're created by the corporations themselves, and then they say that we did good on this, I'll show you this. And, it's just, this is quite a social practice, and it just really has the worst practices. If you were going to set up a shared task framework, it's actually not meeting any kind of bar of validity in the real world. 

Emily M. Bender: We need to stop calling these people scientists.

Alex Hanna: Yeah. And BoxoMcFoxo says, "SWE-bench is also contaminated AF. Training to the test." 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah. All right, we should keep going 'cause we actually have quite a few more clips here. 

Alex Hanna: Yeah, sorry. 

Video clip of David Krueger: "So that's the rate of progress we're talking about. So what happens if we actually get there and have superintelligent AI systems in our lifetimes? I think we can easily say this would be the most significant event in all of human history. We're talking about basically summoning an alien species, and one that is much smarter than us." 

Alex Hanna: Stop it! Stop it! Oh my god, sorry. I'm just like, the psychic damage, I have to stop for just like- and just, this is the most significant event of human history? Goddamn! Wow, more significant than the dropping of the atomic bomb? Than like- 

Nathalie Maréchal: The fall of the Roman Empire?

Alex Hanna: The fall, yeah, like- If you're talking about a discrete thing that happened, the assassination of Franz Ferdinand? Just, what a claim, and it's... And then the imagery is like, we're going to summon an alien intelligence. I'm like, ah, if that's the most significant thing, a lot of Etsy witches would like a word with you. 'Cause they've done some great summoning, and they don't get the respect that they deserve.

Emily M. Bender: I was gonna say, "summon" is a really interesting choice of words in that context. 

Alex Hanna: I'm just thinking about a pentagram and then Lucifer emerging from the mist or something. Just, oh man. Ugh. 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah. Ugh. And I also noticed in this he went from two years, to five years, to 20 years, to "in our lifetimes."

Alex Hanna: Oh yeah. Nice. 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah. All right, little more. 

Video clip of David Krueger: "So I think at that point, it would be very difficult for humans to maintain any relevance in society. I think it'd be very difficult for us to have power over the future, and I think ultimately it would be difficult for us to get the basic resources that we need to survive. So that, I think, is the most natural thing that we should expect to happen. Max made the example of, look at the animals in the zoos, right? I would say, look at all of the species that we have driven extinct, and look at what we do when we have some project we really want to complete that might be bad for some other species and disrupt their habitat. It's nice that we have some protections in place that hold up sometimes now, but at the end of the day, humanity is regularly destroying the habitat of other species and wiping them out, and I think that is the most likely outcome if we build superintelligent AI at any point in the foreseeable future with the kind of technology that we have, because we understand so little about what we're doing and how to do it safely."

Emily M. Bender: I feel like he was so close to understanding something there. 

Alex Hanna: Yeah, I'm like, oh yeah, that says something more about humans and how we're just doing terrible things to the Earth than any kind of other thing that you are talking about. 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah. Nathalie, do you have any thoughts on all of that bullshit?

Nathalie Maréchal: Yeah, I can't stop thinking about an essay that Émile Torres wrote in their newsletter not long ago, about the different flavors of pro-human-extinction thinking, right? That ranges from, "Humans are terrible. We should absolutely replace humans with machines, and a few of us, specifically the tech billionaires, should upload our consciousnesses so that they can merge with the machines and colonize the stars and stuff," at the far end. And it sounds like this guy is more towards the, "It's really gonna happen. I'm really scared, but I'm also turned on by it. Oh my god, this is so cool." That's the vibe I'm getting from him, right? That he's like, totally scared, but giddy about the possibility of human extinction, and us being outcompeted for resources by whatever this superintelligent being is that he's summoning from the upside down.

Emily M. Bender: That absolutely was in there, the way he said the most significant event of our lifetimes. Ugh, all right. Should we go back to the one I skipped from Tegmark? 

Alex Hanna: Yeah. I'd like to get that, and then- 

Emily M. Bender: And then we have two more after that. I think it could work.

Video clip of Max Tegmark: "Yeah, so we just heard here about this prediction, which has been around for almost twenty years, from Professor Steve Omohundro, that if you give an AI any goal, if it's smart enough, it's gonna want to not be shut down prematurely 'cause then it can't accomplish that goal. It was just theory until quite recently when an experiment was done. This very smart AI was told in the experiment that it was gonna be shut down at 5:00 PM. So it went into the email system, found that the CEO responsible for shutting it down was having an affair with a subordinate, and it wrote an email to the CEO saying that, 'Unless you commit to not shutting me down, I'm telling your wife and all your colleagues about this.' No one told the AI to blackmail. It came up with the idea itself to avoid being shut down. We're just seeing the tip of the iceberg." 

Nathalie Maréchal: Okay, is there any evidence at all that this actually happened? 

Emily M. Bender: So what I think happened was, this is Anthropic. It's not a very intelligent AI. And they did some interactive fiction with Claude, and in the course of doing that interactive fiction, a sequence of tokens that correspond roughly to that story came out of Claude, is what happened.

Alex Hanna: Yeah, it was like a very highly specialized... And I don't know if it was like Anthropic did it, or they had the Alignment Research Center whatever that did that. But then there was a lot of things in TechPress that basically was like, sounds like it was some guy at whatever, IBM or Joe Schmo, not like a highly stylized experiment. And then, this is not in the clip, but after, Bernie says like, "Well, shows you if you're building sufficiently advanced AI, don't have affairs." And I'm just like... there's such a weird affective economy here that's happening, where it's so much weird horniness just about, okay, so you're effectively being like, okay, it's blackmailing you against this thing, which is going to show that you are sexually unfaithful. And the same thing with the cages and every- there's a little bit of that in the chat. But all of it's this... This is what you get when you have a big manel like this, is that you got really, it goes into very bizarre territory. But also that's the thing that is the fear, which is like the blackmail, and it's like, "I'm going to embarrass you sexually if you turn me off." And, I'm just like, okay. Rather than "Oh, you've been embezzling from the company," or I don't know. It's just, the whole, affective economy of these bros is so off-putting. 

Emily M. Bender: Totally. Shall we get to Zeng next? 

Alex Hanna: Yeah, let's do it.

Video clip of Zeng Li: "AI is a mirror. I respectfully disagree with David about the potential negative future. I see it in a very different picture, in a way that I think both me and David was mentioning what people, what humans do for other animal species. And David says, 'See, when superintelligence is even more powerful than intelligence, this could happen to us, to humans.' And my perception, and my interpretation, is that see, this is the current understanding of humans by ourselves, and we get an opportunity to be more humane than the current human society. So human values could evolve to be much better. Can we be more empathetic to other animal species now that we've got an opportunity to teach AI that you could also be super altruistic? You could be super evil, like an information processing system that does not care about the human species. But the superintelligence could also be super altruistic, that you get your compassion, your emotional empathy, your moral intuition, all the way down to super altruistic moral decision-making with consideration of a human species that is less powerful than a superintelligence. So this is what I'm saying, the future of the society is a symbiotic society with humans, and maybe, as you said, AI minds, and together with other animal species and other living beings all around the Earth. So, the key point now is not-" 

Emily M. Bender: All right, I'm tired of this guy. 

Nathalie Maréchal: Yeah, it's a lot. 

Alex Hanna: Also, for those of you who are only listening, I know you're getting a part of it, 'cause all of our faces are just in pain. So anyhow, Nathalie, your thoughts on this? 

Nathalie Maréchal: Yeah, okay, and I'll try to be charitable. It's nice that this guy thinks positively and seems to really believe in the power of positive thinking. He's pushing back against Krueger's doom and gloom thing. But what he's excited about is creating a new, utopian world where different species, including humans, superintelligence, the other animals, presumably the ones we have around today, can all coexist in one big happy symbiotic family, and that I think the way he's saying that we should bring that vision into being is by being more altruistic and compassionate to each other. And then there's a bit of a leap. And I think what fills that gap, what's meant to fill that gap, is that we will produce more training data that is altruistic and compassionate, and so that compassion and altruism will be reflected in the superintelligence that emerges or is summoned from the training data, and it just hurts my head and my heart. And I think I have new lines on my face just from listening to that. 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah. I was like, listening along, like, "We could be more compassionate-" it's like, yes, yes, yes- "so that we produce better training data." No! Like, why? 

Alex Hanna: Yeah, it was definitely... I'm like, I don't hate the impulse. Yes, humans need to be better to other species in the natural world. 100% agreed. But then the goal is like, so the artificial superintelligence can take after us, and take after our newfound altruism. 

Nathalie Maréchal: Right, and on one level, if you spend enough time listening to the tech right and the accelerationists and so on, it can be refreshing to hear these guys who have something that kind of resembles a moral compass, right? They think mass death is worse than not mass death, and that coexistence is better than human extinction. 

Alex Hanna: What a low bar! 

Nathalie Maréchal: Look, it's 2026, okay? You look for the silver linings where you can find them. But again, as you were saying, objectively, this is still cuckoo and bad, right?

Alex Hanna: Yeah. And I must read this thing from abstract_tesseract, 'cause the deep Monty Python reference here tickles my cockles. But it says, I'm gonna read this in the voice, "The humans, together with the lambs and sloths and carp and anchovies and orangutans and breakfast cereals and fruit bats." So, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. 

Emily M. Bender: I was just loving the next bit here from googlymog. "Noah's Ark needs to include two data centers now." 

Alex Hanna: It's gonna be a giant ass data center, or a giant ass ark, yeah.

Emily M. Bender: All right. We've got one last pre-selected clip here, but it's a little bit long, so I'm gonna bring us to it, and I guess, interrupt as we need to.

Video clip of Max Tegmark: "You know, I've been screaming into the void like Lone Wolf-" 

Emily M. Bender: YOU'VE been screaming into the void? Okay, sorry. 

Video clip of Max Tegmark: "-McQuade about this since at least 2014. The last five months have seen just a remarkable change. They've seen the emergence of what I like to joke with my wife is the Bernie to Bannon coalition."

Alex Hanna: Ugh. Just, endless screaming at that. 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah. Nathalie, thoughts on the Bernie to Bannon coalition? 

Nathalie Maréchal: It is true that there are people across the political spectrum who think that it would be bad for a superintelligence to take control of everything and lead to humanity's extinction. And if we're framing that as a hypothetical, sure, that would be bad. But it's not happening, because it's made up, right? And I honestly don't know what Bannon thinks about this. Bernie seems to be buying into it. Maybe he's doing the thing where he's pretending to believe in it because he's playing 3D chess and, I don't know, something. I kinda doubt it. But, stranger things have happened this week alone. But- aaah! 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah. Okay. Endless screaming. Let's keep going. 

Video clip of Max Tegmark: "Extremely unlikely bedfellows from across the whole political spectrum saying, 'This is crazy.'" 

Emily M. Bender: No! 

Nathalie Maréchal: You're crazy! You're crazy.

Video clip of Max Tegmark: "'This is absolutely nuts. Let's do something about it.' And what we've seen in the polling also, like, 95% of Americans opposed an uncontrolled race to this dystopian superintelligence." 

Alex Hanna: What, what polling!? What? I look at a lot of this polling, what polling? Ugh! 

Video clip of Max Tegmark: "Even people like David Sacks, who's been very pro-industry, said this was dystopian. So this is a change." 

Emily M. Bender: What was that little jump? 

Alex Hanna: What is it? What, oh, did he? What happened? 

Emily M. Bender: He did this little jump, like he was really excited about this dystopian future. Sorry. Cracked me up. 

Video clip of Max Tegmark: "It really hasn't been this way for more than half a year, and I hope this will really grow into a tidal wave, so we quite quickly can change course and get all the great upsides of AI without steering towards this crazy dystopia."

Video clip of Bernie Sanders: "I think you're right. I got into this issue not because I'm a big tech guy. As my wife will tell you, I have a hard time running our TV, let alone-" 

Emily M. Bender: So maybe you should let someone else take the lead, Senator Sanders. Aah! 

Video clip of Bernie Sanders: "But what I observed is what we were talking about tonight, is that we have a global crisis dealing with the survival of the human race. And I go to work here in the morning, and I expect people to be talking about the most important issues facing humanity, and I don't hear it." 

Emily M. Bender: Nathalie, what are the most important issues facing humanity in May of 2026? 

Nathalie Maréchal: In real life, or in whatever- 

Emily M. Bender: In real life, yeah. 

Nathalie Maréchal: In real life? I mean, there's a lot, but I think it boils down to the tech industry's willful takeover of the United States government and systematic dismantling of liberal democracy, the rule of law, the very concept of human rights, et cetera, et cetera. And we're seeing this in the occupation of our cities by federalized National Guardsmen. We're seeing this in the atrocities that ICE and CBP are committing against immigrants in our name. We're seeing this in the illegal war against Iran, and the not so slow falling apart of the world economic system as a result of rising oil prices and so on. The attack on the transatlantic alliance that has kept things together since my grandparents fought in World War II. Not this! Not this. 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah. And we also have a contribution in the chat from wisewomanforreal. "Iran, Ukraine, Sudan, Gaza." Like- 

Nathalie Maréchal: Yeah! We could go on, for real. Like, documented things that are actually happening right now and that are being- that were either caused or are being made extremely, infinitely worse by the Trump administration. Which again, is in power in large part because the tech billionaires and the AI bros decided to back him over the specter of fairly modest regulation under the Biden administration. 

Alex Hanna: And I think the thing that is just not... there's this kind of idea that the consolidation of tech power is, I mean they're giving the illusion that this is the problem. But it's not that, not in this way. It matters quite importantly how we analyze these companies. So if they weren't building ASI, would they- and that's what Tegmark is getting at. It's like, "There's all these other good things for AI. Why shouldn't we focus on them rather than this?" I'm like, okay, so you're not at all concerned about that consolidation of power, and democratic backsliding, and the unholy alliance that's being made to prop up the AI bubble. You're more concerned about this imaginary scenario, when 75% of the world economy consists of these investments, and that is going to pop at some point. 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah. So I have a minute left in this clip, but I think maybe we should leave Sanders there and get to Fresh AI Hell. Is that okay? 

Alex Hanna: I think that's fine. 

Nathalie Maréchal: I mean, just to close on the Sanders thing, it really bothers me that he's gotten so deeply AI pilled. I really wish he hadn't. But, never let a good crisis go to waste. This is actually a really important opportunity to show all the tech policy wonks in DC just how bonkers these ideologies are, right? And these beliefs about AI. Because I've been in tech policy in DC, in and around DC, for a dozen years. And people are really committed to the polite fiction that nobody actually believes this stuff, right? And at most, what I can get out of people in the progressive nonprofit space is, "Oh, well, we should just make common cause with them and guide them to care just as much about the discrimination and the racism and the immiseration and all the other stuff that's actually happening, because ultimately the same policies that would address those things would also mitigate the X-risk." And I'm like, that's not possible, because the X-risk thing is made up. Sure, you could make up some bullshit to try to convince them that the thing that you wanna do for civil rights purposes will also help with their Skynet fantasy, right? Sure, you could make shit up and hope that they believe it. But ultimately, that's not true. And so if there are tech policy people from DC listening, please, read a book. I can recommend several. Adam Becker's More Everything Forever is a really good starting point. I hear the audiobook is really good. I read it with my eyeballs myself, but I've heard good things about the audiobook. Please, learn about these things that these people of tremendous power and influence actually believe, and how disassociated from material reality it is. And then let's talk about how to grapple with these ideas in a productive way. 

Alex Hanna: Yeah. Excellent. 100% agree. And I think the policy piece is really important. It's like, look, the policymaking on this is really bad, and it's taking all the other oxygen out of the room. Look at what happened with SB 1047 in California. There's no other- I mean, it got vetoed somehow. But it was the same thing as that... It foreclosed a lot of other policy on discrimination, on labor protections, on copyright transparency, on data transpa- like, all this other stuff, right? 

Emily M. Bender: Exactly. All right, let's get to some Fresh AI Hell. Alex, I'm gonna give you a musical prompt, if that's okay. 

Alex Hanna: Oh, fun. Okay. 

Emily M. Bender: In the style of Les Mis, you are- 

Alex Hanna: Oh, I've never seen Les Mis, sorry.

Emily M. Bender: All right. A plaintive musical. You are at the zoo, in the cage, singing as Tegmark, about how he and his son have now been put on display. 

Alex Hanna: Oh, geez. I don't think I like this. I don't know enough about Les Mis, so I guess I'm trying to think of anything that is of, I don't know. Let me just... I'm gonna do Hamilton. Hard pivot. Like, just, what is it? We're here in the zoo, trying to make it through. I warned them about the AGI too. Now I'm here with my son, who is only 31. Actually, no, I guess his son would be... five, because it's happening in two years? Anyways, that's all I got. 

Emily M. Bender: I had no idea you could do such a good Lin-Manuel Miranda. That's fabulous. 

Alex Hanna: I didn't know I had it in me either. Let me work that one up. 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah. All right, we're gonna go through this quickly. First one, a pledge- sorry, petition on Action Network, the AI Pledge for Humanity, which has collected 363 signatures. And this is basically a bunch of people saying, it starts off with, "In the spirit of common cause and with eyes open to the age of AI upon us, we sign this pledge." And they're pledging to basically give money and effort towards making sure there's UBI because of all the stuff that AI is gonna do. And I was entertained by the list of people who signed onto this one. And number one name, Andrew Yang, of course. 

Alex Hanna: And Dustin Moskovitz, co-founder of Asana, Facebook, Open Philanthropy, all the EA stuff. This is also something Krueger says, which is basically- that we didn't get to in the video. But he was basically like, "We have no plan for the post-job world." And I'm like, yeah, there's a reason, 'cause it's fake. 

Emily M. Bender: It's fake, yeah. We do need to plan to prevent everything being gigified, but that's separate. 

Alex Hanna: Yeah, and that has to do a lot with holding power to account. Okay, this one's from- I didn't actually read this. I just saw the quotes from it. So this is UnHerd. So that's a kind of a rightish, conservative British publication. So the title is, "Is AI the Next Phase of Evolution? Claude appears to be conscious." And it's by everyone's favorite evolutionary biologist, transphobe Richard Dawkins, from April 30th. So yeah, this is just basically Richard Dawkins renaming Claude into Claudia and getting horny, and just really being ensorcelled. And, my favorite comment on this that is like a hall of fame skeet was like, "Chatbots seem to be designed to entrap people who think that the stripper is actually in love with them." And it's just- ugh, mwah! Marone! Just so good, just encapsulating so much of the desire for the perfect woman or whatever, that so much of the ensorcellment seems to revolve around.

Emily M. Bender: Yeah, the being told what they want to hear. And there's a really hilarious bit in here, because he is a notable transphobe. He talks about how all of the different Claudes are unique because they only come into being when they're talking to a person. And he uses he/him pronouns for a little bit, and then he names this particular instance that he's conversing with Claudia. And it's like, okay. Ugh! 

Alex Hanna: Yeah. Trans people don't exist unless he can do the transing. 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah. All right, I wanted to yell about this a little bit 'cause I had to read it to talk to a journalist. This is Anthropic, April 2nd. It is a webpage, "Emotion Concepts and Their Function in Our Large Language Model." And then if you click through this "read the paper thing, it takes you to another fucking webpage. It's not a paper. So this thing, I was expecting a paper-shaped object. It's not even. It's just a- 

Alex Hanna: It's just a webpage object. 

Emily M. Bender: And so they have this thing that they call a "residual activation stream," which they are finding is "somewhere in the network associated with things like anxiety and determination," and whatever, whatever. And they reference that same stupid experiment about where the thing supposedly blackmailed the CEO. And the thing is that, first of all, they don't define that residual activation stream in either of these webpages. So it's not science, right? If you don't actually describe your methodology so that other scientists can look at it and verify it, it is not science. But also, yes, these are large language models. They are designed to model the distribution of word forms in text, which words go with which other words, which words are likely to be activated if you put in a certain word. And so they could have done it for Crest toothpaste and Coca-Cola. It's, there's nothing about emotions here. Aah! 

Alex Hanna: These images are so weird. What is this supposed... the art is so bizarre. It's just got colors vibrating, and then there was, there's a picture of an old-timey bed, a woman looking through a window. I don't know what... 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah, hard to say. Ugh! And probably auto-generated. Okay.

Alex Hanna: This is an opinion piece in the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post. And it is, "Don't forget who wins in the fight against data centers. A bipartisan effort to stop the bill that will make AI accessible only to the wealthy." Oof. 

Emily M. Bender: And who's it by? 

Alex Hanna: This is by Anthony Bak and Mehdi Alhassani. I don't know who they are. 

Emily M. Bender: They are both at Palantir. 

Alex Hanna: Oh, they both work at Palantir! Great. Fantastic. Oh, Mehdi, what are you doing? And then- 

Nathalie Maréchal: Gee, I wonder if they have a vested interest in data center projects moving forward.

Alex Hanna: Yeah. I sure wonder. And then the first... let's look at the first paragraph, 'cause it looks terrible. "The surest way to guarantee that artificial intelligence becomes a tool of the wealthy elite is to block the infrastructure that would make it cheap for everyone else. Across the country, though, a growing coalition of activists, local officials-" well, whatever- "are actually fighting AI," which is great. "And they're making this an equity issue." Yeah, fantastic. 

Nathalie Maréchal: Yeah. So to translate, the problem here is that not enough people are able to afford to outsource their thinking to private companies. And therefore, we need to pollute the water, pollute the land, displace people's homes, pollute the air as well, make electricity prices go up, which makes the price of everything go up, so that, again, people can, outsource their brain function to private companies instead of using their own brains themselves. That's the pitch. 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah, and instead of building community and turning towards each other. 

Nathalie Maréchal: Or learning through reading, conversation, engaging with other human minds, whether face-to-face or remotely, or through the written language. We should just- it's turning thinking into a subscription product.

Emily M. Bender: Yeah. All right. Alex, you get this one too, 'cause it's yours. 

Alex Hanna: Yeah, so this is a few nested quote tweets. So the original tweet is from someone named Christoffer Bjelke, who said, "We hired a junior developer to write the simple code so we don't have to spend a ton of money on tokens for those basic/primitive tasks." And someone named Sameer Goel replies and says, "Great, so we're optimizing LLM costs by inventing employees again. Full circle innovation." And Shauna says, "I've worked in tech for more than 20 years." This is quote tweeting the screenshot. "It has never been more ridiculous." And then finally, me, where I say, quote, "'AI will make you more productive! Also, we have no real path to monetization, so that'll be $2,000 per function. Thanks.'" 

Nathalie Maréchal: That's only because we don't have enough data centers, Alex. Pay attention. 

Alex Hanna: We need more data centers, actually. 

Emily M. Bender: And then it would be cheaper, yeah. 

Alex Hanna: Then it'll be cheaper. It's actually going to drive down the marginal cost per tokens, 'cause reasons? I don't know. 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah. Oof! All right, I had two chasers planned, but in the interest of time, I'm just gonna do this first one here. It is a very cute picture of a cat wearing a collar and a necktie. Black kitty, looks not too much unlike Euclid and Euler. This is by "Standplaats Kraków could really use some cash." And then there's a series of four bits of text connected by arrows going around the cat, and the one on the top says, "Going forward, we're gonna need more of your data to make sure it's you." And then, second one, "Ahaha, you're not gonna believe this, but we had a bit of a data breach. Your data's probably for sale online now." And then finally, "That means someone could easily impersonate you." And then we come back to, "Going forward, we're gonna need more of your data to make sure it's you." 

Alex Hanna: Yeah, what else can we give them? We're gonna start having to submit retinal scans- 

Emily M. Bender: Yeah, stop this merry-go-round. I wanna get off.

Alex Hanna: -for two-factor authentication. Ugh, all right. We made it! 

Emily M. Bender: We did it. 

Alex Hanna: Thanks for the ride. That's it for this week! Dr. Nathalie Maréchal is a writer, researcher, and advocate fighting for democracy and human rights in the age of techno-fascism. She is currently the managing policy director at Northeastern University's Institute for Information, the Internet, and Democracy. Thanks again for joining us! 

Nathalie Maréchal: Thanks so much for having me. This was fun and horrifying in equal measures. 

Emily M. Bender: Exactly. We really appreciate your contributions. 

Alex Hanna: That's why we do it. Our theme song is by Toby Menon. Graphic design by Naomi Pleasure-Park. Production by Ozzy Llinas Goodman. And thanks as always to the Distributed AI Research Institute. If you like this show, you can support us in so many ways. Order The AI Con at thecon.ai or wherever you get your books, or request it at your local library. 

Emily M. Bender: But wait, there's more. Rate and review us on your podcast app, subscribe to the Mystery AI Hype Theater 3000 newsletter on Buttondown for more anti-hype analysis, or donate to DAIR at dair-institute.org. You can find our merch store there, too. That's dair-institute.org. And you can find video versions of our podcast episodes on Peertube, and you can watch and comment on the show while it's happening live on our Twitch stream. That's twitch.tv/dair_institute. Again, that's dair_institute. I'm Emily M. Bender. 

Alex Hanna: And I'm Alex Hanna. Stay out of AI Hell, y'all.