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Anthropic is Now Running Television Ads Threatening Humanity
I saw this ad play on my tv while watching the England vs Argentina postgame. I could not believe what I was watching. I had vaguely heard of a tone-deaf video from Anthropic communications, but I hadn't actually watched it until it popped up on my screen against my will. I am stunned that this is how Anthropic chose to portray themselves to the general public. Maybe this sort of messaging works on a tiny subset of niche technological policy nerds, but they played this during the World Cup.
The ad opens with scenes of destruction: a house ablaze, civil unrest in the streets, hundreds of graves at Arlington National Cemetary. A concerned voiceover asks the questions that many of us ask of the AI industry every day. "Can AI be trusted?" "Who's gonna hit the brakes if we need to?" "How do we really ensure that what we're aiming to acheive really does benefit the majority of people?" All good questions that the rest of the ad is utterly unconcerned with answering.
It feels like a threat. It doesn't feel like they're saying, "oh please God somebody stop us". It feels like they're saying, "just try and stop us, MUAHAHAHAHA!" I suppose it's good that they acknowledge the gravity of what they are undertaking, but that doesn't really matter if they keep doing it anyway.
Also, sort-of-unrelated-but-not-really: Is "Total Clanker Genocide" an acceptable sign for an anti-AI protest?
Apropos of England vs Argentina, I absolutely called it: https://www.themotte.org/post/3822/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/458055?context=8#context
Wouldn't be England if they didn't first give us hope only to lose in the worst possible way and to the worst possible team to lose to.
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I've interpreted the images at the beginning of this ad as "there's so much suffering in the world already, all caused without AI, that it makes these questions sound stupid", but maybe I'm reading too much into it.
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I am still perplexed by Arlington in particular. What concern were they even trying to convey? Was it something as detached as "hmm look up common symbols of loss of life that register to American normies, ok this one would work"?
They have just had a very ugly fight with the Department of War because they refused to maximally assist Trump and Hegseth with their lethality maxxing, and specifically were accused (as it happens) of endangering the lives of Our Boys who bleed and spill blood for Freedom. So what's the narrative?
"If AI is unchecked, it may send Americans to die"?
"Unaligned AI will fight the US Army"?
"If Anthropic doesn't have supremacy in AI, many American servicemen will die fighting China"? (actually a plausible argument, but inconsistent with the rest).
The voiceover provides little insight.
As a palate cleanser, I offer the new video from Kimi Moonshot. Absolutely meaningless, clearly aping earlier, better-designed Anthropic ads, but pretty. It hypes up the upcoming K3 that seems to be stronger than Opus 4.8. Looking forward to the next geopolitical post from Dario.
I thought it was an ad just for AI engineers to show 'yeah we get it, this is existential, come work with us and not Zuck's short-form video hell factory or OpenAI's revolving-door chief safety facade officer'.
Anthropic doesn't care about the peasants, they want to draw more talented people from Google or OpenAI or Meta. Peasants include the bulk of the US govt too I think, standing up to Trump enhances Dario's clout amongst those he's really courting.
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I'm in favour of normalising hate speech against clankers, at least.
Anyway, I can sort of see what they were going for here - we know you have concerns, we're listening, we want to take your worries seriously. I don't think they understand how widely loathed their technology is, though, and therefore how much what they're saying comes off as a bad parody or even villainous and sneering.
I think @JeSuisCharlie had a good quip about this. "If you need a style guide for not sounding like an evil robot, something something". The style guide being a reference to one of Scotts actual posts, though I don't remember if it was actually making the evil robot comparison, or I'm recalling it that way due to being primed by the current subject.
This one?
That's the one!
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So my take is that Dario really likes the Biden era AI plan where there would be a small number of officially sanctioned companies who worked with government on regulation and all other AI vendors would be effectively banned.
He thinks that by making threats and warnings he can get that back.
However he is bad at politics. He doesn't seem to grasp that the Trump admin isn't going to give him any control over government policies. They are philosophically opposed to a setup where the elected President has to follow the dictates of a specific citizen with no constitutional authority.
The Fable block is best understood in this light.
"Our model is so dangerous! Congress must act to regulate us!"
"We can regulate you without Congress."
So I think we're going to see a long series of events where Anthropic pokes the government and the government smacks them down. At least for the rest of Trump's term.
Dario might end up putting himself in a position where's he's ousted. I think that's more likely than him learning to back down.
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That ad reminds me of the secret projects from Alpha Centauri. "The Artificial Intelligence" would fit right in with "The Self-Aware Colony" and "The Dream Twister".
See also "Cognitive Trope Therapy": "if your proposed program sounds like something the Rebel Alliance has to fly a daring fighter raid to blow up before it can be activated, consider you might be the bad guy."
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Is Anthropic evil or is it stupid?
For the longest time I thought they knew what they were doing, that this is all a ploy to force governments to regulate and thereby establish their dominant position over the field forever, since any competitor would no longer be able to even get the computer required. And then they can happily be the people who decide what you get to know about in a society that relies heavily on their product, a much stronger position that the people who regulate them.
But if they really wanted that, why the hell would they put insane conditions on military contracts? Maybe instead they got high off their own supply and are actually convinced they're making God and that because they're such right thinking bourgeois liberals, God will have their values and it's futile to resist the promised eternal rule of the managerial theaterkid Reich. Just be a nice heckin human bean okay, God cares.
Is there a third option I'm missing? Because what could bring someone to have made this "ad"? It's literally just saying "yes we are going to destroy your life, but not to worry, we still care about you in some abstract sense". Regular "we care" corporate bullshit at least has the decency to not fear monger about itself whilst delivering the empty platitudes.
Sincerely, do you imply here that AI is not going to be a strategically decisive technology? At present, Anthropic's power is nothing before Pete Hegseth, but that's not guaranteed to remain the case.
I'm not quite sure what you're implying here; it's quite possible that Anthropic's power eclipses that of Hegseth (because he gets fired) but in what world can Anthropic's power ever eclipse that of the American military?
In any in-distribution scenario the power of any American corporation is strictly inferior to the military (because the military has a monopoly on violence and the corporation does not) and in any crazy sci-fi FOOM / ASI loss of control scenario, Anthropic and the military will have the same amount of power (none).
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It's deeply disturbing to me that many people who care enough about this shit to have opinions on it have theory of mind on Anthropic this bad. Yes, obviously they're convinced that they're making God; they're saying it super explicitly. Many of their competitors believe they're doing the same thing and are simply more inclined to lie about it. If you start from the position "that this is all a ploy to force governments to regulate and thereby establish their dominant position over the field forever, since any competitor would no longer be able to even get the computer required", and that they'd have to get "high off their own supply" to have higher ambitions than that, then no, you have no idea what the fuck is going on.
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I'm pretty sure it's this. They want Curtis Yarvin's cryptographically secure totalitarian regime, but with liberal constitutionalist characteristics.
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This is clearly and obviously not intended as a threat. This is their attempt to signal "we're paying attention to your concerns and are going to try to take them into account while we go forward".
The ad is not actually answering the questions, because they don't have answers. They're not explicitly saying "we are going to solve these problems", but they're definitely not saying "we don't care about these problems. They are implying they are going to solve the problems without making any explicit claims or promises. It's ultimately a hollow attempt at placating anti-AI concerns, but there is no reasonable way to interpret it as a "threat". It's just empty corporate "we care" slop.
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