Is the "Rogue AI" Narrative a Psyop? with the Independent Media Alliance

We're going to be discussing the idea of the false binary.

What an illusion of choice does, it establishes the baseline assumptions that nobody questions.

This is part of the 5th generation warfare that we've talked about. Voting for the lesser of two evils is definitely an emotional, psychological trap that people are in.

You're cheerleading for an insane ideology because you think you're winning.

The role we have as media, how do we help everybody understand this is theater and you need to get back into the real world?

If you're opposed to the agenda, you should oppose it regardless of who's selling it to you.

All right, welcome to another Independent Media Alliance panel. My name is Derek Brose with the Conscious Resistance Network. We're not going to waste too much time. I'm here with Ryan, Last American Vagabond, James with Corporate Report, Steve, AM Wake Up, as well as other shows. We might have a few other people join us in a couple of minutes, but as the title shows you today Is the rogue AI narrative a psyop? This is a conversation I'm sure those of you out there who've been paying any attention to corporate media, uh, you've been hearing about rogue AI the whole summer going into the fall now, starting with OpenAI, their AI agent breaking out and attacking Hugging Face, and then Anthropic acknowledging some alleged similar incidents, and then Meta, and then Google, and so on and so forth. And as of just last week, I don't know if you guys saw the U.S. Senate, one of the committees had a hearing about rogue AI. So we're at that point now. Bill Gates has given New York Times interviews and people are calling for an international treaty similar to the Nuclear Proliferation Treaty for AI and all sorts of things are being suggested. So the goal for today is just to let the folks here dissect this and digest it and share our thoughts. So I'll just kick it off, I guess, and just admit my skepticism of the narrative. Of course, I do wanna acknowledge our friends and IMA members over at OffGuardian have I think at this, at this point, a 6-part piece, uh, 6-part investigation into the rogue AI, um, potential psyop. And I share that skepticism. I also will add a little nuance or counter that with saying that I don't think there are no reasons to be concerned about AI, and we can get into that as well. So I, you know, I just want to add that out there— skeptical, and I think we should probably still be thinking about where this is all headed. So I'll pass it on, Ryan, and whoever else wants to pick it up.

Yeah, I mean, I share the same sentiment. I mean, when this first started, the conversation going around, I thought it was interesting, the, the reaction. I mean, I think it's— we've gone through so many different sort of like problem-reaction-solution scenarios where we feel like we sense that this is sort of a setup, or, you know, you're jumping at shadows. And we've seen this through COVID and plenty of things, so it's, it's an expected sort of response, you know, to try to see how the next narrative might be used But what's interesting, when I first saw it going around, was to me, I'm thinking, okay, well, clearly we all know that there's potential risk here, right? Like, I don't even think that's debatable. So I thought it was interesting for those out there that ultimately made it, you know, not. I think most everybody, you know, I think everybody in the IMA is very clearly addressing that there's risks involved. But then the secondary thought was, you know, how can this be used against us? And the one I think we all seem to agree on is, you know, the idea of forcing this into some look, for your safety, we'll make sure we can verify things, or, you know, digital ID dynamics, or the idea of using this in a separate point in a way to sort of justify action in a false flag type of sense. You know, there's a lot of ways we can get into how this can be abused, but it's interesting that it's on the most simple level being used to act like there's now no risk, which might very well be the entire point. I mean, seeing Bill Gates and the rest come out felt a little too on the nose, you know. Just as an opening, I think that's A good starting point, you know, getting into the risk too.

James, you have short time. You, by all means, please jump in.

Sure, let me jump in. Yes, Ryan, I couldn't agree more. I think that we are seeing the beginning of a pincer movement. We are being placed into a false— or potentially placed into a false dichotomy where I would like to think, not to sort of poo-poo or spoil the entire, you know, foundational purpose of this, uh, gathering today. But I think we are all agreed there are absolute psyop aspects to the rogue AI narrative that's been presented to us, and we could talk about them. Again, I'm sure most of our audience will be familiar with them already, going, of course, from the, the latest iteration of this in the Jacob Coxon resignation. This complete nobody with zero followers announces his resignation, and I believe it was, um, I, I saw this, I didn't verify it, but I, I believe the Washington Post article about That resignation post went up 18 minutes before his tweet went out. So yeah, anyway, I think it's pretty safe to say that there are clearly manipulated parts of this narrative that are meant to be thrusting this into our conversation right now. But exactly as you point out, Ryan, I think we run the risk of being put into an interesting position where this gets routed into one of those left-right phony dichotomy sorts of positions. Because yes, we absolutely see a lot of people associated with the political left lining up to scream about this rogue AI threat and how we need this regulation to take care of it. But what is being opposed to that? I mean, if all we are saying is that the rogue AI narrative and Jacob Coxon is a psyop, then we are essentially just parroting Fox News at this point because that's exactly what they're saying as well. And the, the person that I saw articulate this, uh, the most clearly, um, a couple of weeks ago now was Ed Dowd. He had a post up on his Substack, The AI Game of Thrones, in which he posits what is being presented to us is exactly that type of dichotomy. And he says it's like a Game of Thrones scenario between House Monopoly and House Speed Racer. And House Monopoly is, of course, the, the, the big tech AI bro tech overlords or would-be overlords who want, of course, the monopoly. to be cemented through government regulation. And if people don't know how that works, I have an episode in my podcast archives about the social media psyop of, oh, don't regulate us, government. Oh, no. And I was talking a decade ago about Facebook and others who actually do want regulation because it keeps upstarts and newcomers out of the space, right? So their bread is buttered on getting this regulation put in place to make sure that they do not have competition. And again, that's exactly the sort of thing that Fox News and others are pointing out. But on the other side of that, then I guess if we're against that, then we must be House Speed Racer, by which Ed Dowd means, hey guys, full steam ahead there. Rogue AI is just a total psyop. So guys, what we need is to— that's all Chinese, you know, FUD that they're trying to put out there to stop us from winning the AI race. We need to double down and start building more data centers, etc. We shall not fall into that trap, I would like to pause it because I think that's where, you know, the real danger of this is. As you say, there are genuine dangers to this AI tech, whatever you want to call it, that is coming into place. And I think we need to be smarter about not just, not just identifying one half of the psyop. We need to see the whole thing.

No, you're absolutely correct. And for every narrative management operation, there has to be a counter-narrative management operation, or else you run the risk of losing control of your narrative management operation right out the gate. There was no real counter-narrative in place before Shlomo the plumber, the hero of FlyDubai, you know, and that fell apart in about 3 seconds and is now a punchline. But with something like AI, you definitely see The people who are pushing the don't know, don't worry, it's all fake and gay tend to line up with this. James was saying the bro-ligarchy on a lot of these issues, and it seems to be much more of everyone's got their same 8 lines that they're tweeting out every day. And it's a uniform march to full speed ahead. But China, we've got to win. There's no pausing or stopping. We just have to do the thing. And so I would be wary of anyone peddling that particular narrative without encouraging some nuance, that's for sure. And there's within the team monopoly There are the people, the Zuckerbergs, uh, Larry Ellison's one of them. Musk is leaning more towards it where they're, uh, or, uh, sorry, uh, uh, Anthropic CEO, um, much more, more for concrete guardrails that are going to ensure a quasi-monopoly going forward. And then there's, uh, Sam Altman, who says that he has like a light touch. approach to this, very different than his relationship with his sister. He would prefer there be a much more hands-off relationship regarding, uh, OpenAI and his future.

Yeah, um, so yeah, great points here. I want to go ahead and just, since I mentioned it, and just share it because I don't think they're going to be here, but as I mentioned at the beginning, there's a series of articles, I think it's 6 at this point, from Kit Knightley at OffGuardian. Just show that, off-guardian.org. If you check out Kit's page, I think the most recent one was just a week or so ago, Rogue AI Regulation, Rogue AI is COVID 2.0. So he's got a lot, I think, laying out the different, you know, reasons to be skeptical as we're gonna cover here. And I'll also be referencing an article I did recently for T-Lab when we get a little deeper into this. You know, one of the things that I think is important to acknowledge that I don't think I'm seeing from the conspiracy realist skeptic crowd of like, oh, Bill Gates is saying it automatically must be bad. And as you were pointing out, James, it's like if we don't, If we're not nuanced with this, then we're just parroting Fox News, 'cause at this point, Trump is saying it's all a hoax. And so, you know, it's— and not to say that just because Trump says something, we should automatically be against it, of course, but there's reasons to be skeptical and not just buy in and say, okay, well, anything they're saying must be bad. And because they're using language, which they are, like cyber pandemic, or they're gonna make new viruses, or it's COVID 2.0, those are all good reasons to be skeptical. But I do think a lot of nuance is lost. And so I'll just share how I've been approaching this topic. I mean, I do, like you mentioned, a Washington Post article, James, I do consume a lot of corporate media for research purposes 'cause I wanna know what they're talking about. And so over the last 3 months of this whole rogue AI narrative, I've been listening to the New York Times podcast, the Washington Times podcast, reading the articles, listening to interview after interview of the AI doomers, you know, saying like, this is, we got 10 years and all the different scenarios. I sat through Bill Gates's whole interview with the New York Times to hear what is his solution. One of the things I thought was interesting that he mentioned, we might have to limit open source models. So there could be something to, you know, that whole angle there. But the reason I mentioned that is because I think some of our colleagues and people out there maybe aren't taking that approach and they're just hearing mainstream saying something, the opposite must be true. And so I'm not gonna listen at all. But then when you get into it, it is a bit more nuanced. The New York Times also interviewed the head of Nvidia, of course the chipmaker, Jensen Huang, I believe is his name. And he actually is completely against this narrative. He says that these people are all doomers, that they're blowing it out of proportion. And he's somebody, you know, obviously he stands to benefit with the chips he's selling, related to AI. But then Nvidia last week, they announced that they have some new software or some kind of program that they said will prevent rogue AI from happening. I didn't get too deep into it. My point being that it's not all just the doomers saying this. There is a different narrative, and it's not just the Trump saying it's all fake and it's a hoax. So I think it is more complex than sometimes our side of things want it to be, where it's just black and white.

I would argue that that plays exactly into that house monopoly, house speed racer thing I was talking about. The house monopoly are going to be the Altmans, the Musks, the people who are directly involved in creating these AI models because their competition is going to be open-source models and things like that. So the regulation is what protects them. Jensen Huang and people like that are the people who are providing infrastructure and chips and things to the AI companies. Their interest is in AI going full throttle.

Sure.

And so I don't think there's any sort of, you know, the only nuance is who is, which side is each individual person bread buttered on. And again, it comes to this dichotomy. To me, okay, there's 2 things about this. One is that the rogue AI narrative, one of the things that's embedded in that narrative is the fact that these AI agents are now out there doing all this stuff. And the obvious regulation for this is actually going to be less about what we're going to do to OpenAI and xAI and all these places to stick it to them. To them, it's going to be about what they're going to do to stick it to us, because you're going to have to prove you are human. to use the internet very soon. And how can we possibly— hey, I've got an idea. There's this digital ID thing and you'll have to sign in to get on the internet, etc. So we know that is coming and that is part of what this push is about. The other thing is I would like to put it on the table for discussion. Yes, Rogue AI, the narrative is a psyop in various ways, as we've discussed. But the real question is, what is our position in this? Because generally speaking, these types of narratives and how they play out at the congressional level, etc., Again, it's the political theatrics that we are meant— we are by our nature placed in the position of spectators looking at the cave wall, and they want us to root for this side or that side on the cave wall. What are we going to do about any of this? The AI revolution is happening right now. The data centers are being built. What on earth is our position in this, and what do we have to, to do about this.

One, one thing to lay over the top of that, and we'll get— let's get into that because we'll get into more of the weeds of that important part of the conversation. But just still on that opening part, I think to add to what you guys were saying, it's important to look at it like this. And the way I see it is that they win either way. And that's easy to understand, but for some people, they— I don't think they're recognizing that, that this is, you know— and that doesn't mean that they all actually agree, you know. Like, James made an excellent point there, and some of these levels of the same larger, you know, larger plan they want that. It's better for them. Some of them would prefer that they can maximize their control and their influence. And, you know, there's— but at the end of the day, like, you're— I always, you know, reference the Standard Oil example. You know, it's clear that you can make this work for all of it. And so it's kind of like that false battle. And one thing I point out is that you have to realize, you know, these are companies. They have shareholders. They have a fiduciary responsibility to make money. And so the argument that they would come out and go, oh, doomsday, this is going to fail, would literally be, I argue, like a violation of that, at least that they would see it that way. And so they'd be like, get this guy out of here who's poo-pooing our entire model. So my mind is that they see it as a way to gain that control, or to gain, you know, like the nationalization, which would give them more influence with the government, or the opposite way, which would give them more control over the entire thing. We could talk about the idea of this, of Donald Trump's executive order giving national security interests literal state weapons, like direct energy weapons and drones being aimed right at— well, technically speaking, it's still going through Congress, but I feel it's strongly going to pass both sides, where it gives them these weapons. So thinking about it like that, realizing that either way it goes, they all, you know, it's like a one kind of way to look at it. Back to James's point, you know, what, where do we stand? And I'll throw it to everybody else since I threw that in there.

Well, and just real quick to, to tag off of what you said, Ryan, the, uh, same people that are coming forth with all of the doomsday narratives are also saying the only way that we can stop it is if you preemptively give us $2 trillion and make us a part of the national security infrastructure. invariably untouchable in perpetuity. That's the only way that we know how to, to slow this down at all.

Too big to fail.

So to, to your question, James, um, so I think that it's clear, at least with everybody here, that we're all very aware of the potential and seeming, you know, reality that the rogue AI narrative is— at the least seems to be a sort of pessimistic fear marketing campaign to, you know, potentially boost their profits, or at least to call for regulation, as we've seen further their own regulatory capture, because it is the big 4 firms that are really calling for it— OpenAI, Google, Meta, Anthropic— and to try to, as usual, as people do with the government, try to use the government to limit their competitors and any future AI firms that are basically going to have to play catch-up and to cut their legs out from under them. So it seems like we're generally on that agreement of that. I do want to focus on solutions here, and then in a bit I want to talk about what I found with why there's more reasons to be skeptical, the fact that Those 4 companies I mentioned, that all 4 of them were using the same Israeli testing company that said, whoops, we accidentally let the models onto the internet. There wasn't actually a breakout. It was their, their own, we left the door open, my bad, we'll patch that later. But it made for great headlines of AI models escaped. So I think that's another reason to be skeptical of it. Um, another sort of connected tissue to this topic relating to the IMA is, you know, in terms of solutions that James talking about, Many of you listening will probably be aware that a couple months ago we launched this IMA AI Transparency Pledge. Now, not everybody who is participating in the IMA, whether on panels or other things like that, signed, and there was no requirement that everybody signed, just to be clear. But it was just for those who either are using AI or may use it in the future to say, this is the way I'm going to use it. I'm going to put an AI policy on my website. I did that. A few others did as well.

Yeah. So in terms of solutions, Just clarify what you said though. What your point was is that we're not using AI in our content. That made it sound like we are being transparent about it. Just wanna make that clear.

Either way, being transparent is the point because there are some people within the IMA that are using AI, you know, so that's because that is the point. And the whole thing was not to say you can't use AI if you're in the IMA, but if you are, maybe you should, as journalists, I think owe the audience, be transparent about it. So my point being, in terms of solutions, that's one of the solutions that I'm pursuing is just being more transparent about, honest about my own use. If and when that does happen. But as far as what we can do to prepare for this rogue AI narrative, I mean, I think if you're somebody who does believe in open source AI models, you know, where you're talking about you got your own node hosted on your computer, some people are running these, they're not even connected to the internet. They just trained their own model on all the health books you can think of, all the freedom philosophy, all the off-grid skills and everything else. And they've got this awesome empowered AI bot that they can say, hey, how do I build my house today or whatever, right? That is amazing. And I think if you're somebody who supports that and believes in that, you probably should go full force into that before they try to outregulate you and say that having one of those means it's illegal. So I do get how many people believe, like, which is not my position necessarily, that we should embrace the AI as a tool and use them to fight against them. Because here we are, and people like Bill Gates are saying, yeah, we're gonna have to do something about those open source models because all it takes is one bad lone wolf to go out there and, you know, get the nuclear launch codes and blah blah, whatever else they're claiming. So I'm just throwing that out there. If you are into open, open source AI models, then maybe shore those up however you can.

Well, what's interesting is, you know, we— I think in our last panel we talked about whether this is inevitable and so on. I think the important way to look at that question is, you know, the government involved in any way and how that works, because I think it's— we have to acknowledge that this happening at some point, like individual, it's inevitable. An individual could make this if he has the tech know-how. Right? So some individual out there can make his own thing and use it in his own purposes. So that's— I feel like that's inevitable. Not that I want that to happen, but knowing that that's going in that direction, folding that into the way we view this, you know, essentially to James's question, you know, so we can see that there's a risk, right? The idea not just of rogue AI, but of anything in the direction it's going. There's an— I mean, it's uncharted territory. It's inevitable that there's going to be risks, especially when you have genociders and warmongers and everything else we could fold into that. And so that's obvious. So the question of how— what are our stances? I'll speak for myself. You know, I look at it like if I was able to stop this from happening at all, that's what I would do. And I think that's important, you know, just to complete against how that changes the world. But knowing that that is probably inevitable, my point is I think where our stance— or I'd say from my stance— is making sure that the government has no role in that whatsoever. Now, that may be counterintuitive for some people because the argument's going to be, well, it's going to, you know, I mean, I guess the question is, do we really think that government cares at all about regulating this for safety? I would argue I think we can prove to ourselves that they don't care about that. So if that's the case, and that's my opinion, then the argument would be that they shouldn't be involved at all. Now, the question on top of that would be then, how do we go forward in that world? But starting with where we are, I think government involvement and how they're abusing this and how they use it against us is the core of the entire conversation.

I mean, even if you did trust that government regulation was the answer, which I don't think the majority of anybody here today would be arguing that. Like, even if you thought the government was the best institution to do that, I mean, imagine they announced we're going to start regulating AI tomorrow. Every single one of those AI companies is going to start hiding whatever they can and, you know, preparing for the government goons to show up at their office and say, hey, we're here to shut that down and press the button and unplug the Wi-Fi and whatever else. They would be downloading their models and shipping them off in secret crates and hiding them. Like, I don't really know what the solution is in terms of like preparing for the realistic concerns, which we haven't gotten to yet, but we can get into in a bit. Because I do again think there are realistic concerns related to AI. And so even if it's not the rogue AI narrative, we're going to be dead in 10 years, there are things that we should be worried about. And I don't think we can trust the government would be able to do anything about it, even if they say they are.

No, I—

go ahead, go ahead, Steve, go ahead.

I'm gonna say no, but unfortunately you can't trust the current crop of bro-ligarchs. Either, so I I think maybe we should all hold hands and ask Santa for crates full of EMP guns, maybe flamethrowers. I'm like, I'm kidding, but at the same time learn how to build them. It's uh it it's one of those things where unfortunately all of the least trustworthy people are involved on every level and on every side of it, and until. There's either some sort of like localized, wherever you are, all over the place conversation happening about whether you're going to allow any of this in your community, whether you're going to push back on a data center or something like that, whatever you're going to do to extricate yourselves from that and then safeguard you. I think that should be a topic of conversation at, at, you know, first of all, a small group level, but then build out towards a localized community level.

It is interesting to me that the obvious parallel here, when we talk about this regulatory framework that they want to set up and that people like Gates and others are now pushing for, is the nuclear proliferation framework, which is the obvious parallel. So we've done this before. We've got this international system of treaties and monitoring and regulatory agencies. And that is how we keep the nuclear genie in the bottle, except for, you know, I mean, Pakistan somehow ended up with a bomb and North Korea, I guess, ended up with a bomb somehow or other. And let's not look too deeply into the details of that. Oh, wait, we could. And for people who are interested, I do have a 2013 report on Nuclear Secrets: How America Helped Pakistan get the bomb. Of course, people can look into North Korea and its program and Rumsfeld and, uh, how North Korea ended up getting the bomb, etc. And of course, we should be looking at what just happened with Iran, of course, and the IAEA and Palantir's, uh, role in getting them, uh, declared as a nuclear threat right before the, uh, 12-Day War that totally obliterated Iran's nuclear program completely to pieces. which then needed to be done again several months later. No, obviously, obviously, if that is the parallel that we're looking at, then the nuclear regulatory framework is, is the shining example of why absolutely none of this can be trusted at all. Yes, there is such a thing as a nuclear threat. I think that that is a real thing. But my God, that whole thing, top to bottom, is a, is a game that is being played by oligarchs, and they get to move pieces around the chessboard as they will. Oh, you see them? They're developing nukes. Well, we got to go in after them. So that is the way that the AI regulatory framework will work, except in this case, it won't be nation states policing nation states. No, it could be literally anyone. And that was part of what Gates was talking about in that Ezra Klein interview you were talking about there, Derek. I hope people will listen to it because I think it's interesting and instructive on a number of levels, one of which is that, of course, Gates is also pimping AI at the same time as he's warning about AI, which is an interesting dance. But you can hear him make that. But also another part of this is that he actually downplays the rogue AI narrative because his— he, as he says, yeah, okay, maybe long term that is a threat, but the short-term real threat is bioweapons that can be developed now by, you know, just a person sitting there with access to an AI model without any guardrails. They could start developing, you know, novel diseases in their basement right now. And so What is— so how do we do this? How do we take that nuclear regulatory framework that currently works at the nation-state UN level and bring that down to literally everyone's desktop? Well, not without complete and total 100% control and surveillance of the digital realm, which we know has always been the goal. Here's the perfect way to achieve that. So yes, I again like the nuclear threat. I think the nuclear threat is a real thing, but of course it is used as a part of this more elaborate game that's being played in the exact same way AI will be, except as I say, it won't be about the nation-states. It'll be about every single individual on the planet.

So you make an interesting point right there about the, the foreign policy side of it, right? Because I, I see those as 2 separate things, even though they're the same sort of agenda, but one aimed at foreign states that maybe don't go along with certain agendas, one aimed at us to fold us into the surveillance. But what you, what you said is it basically the idea that we all— I mean, I'm sure— I don't know if I'm jumping ahead a little bit, but getting into these things, you can see that the government, the, you know, governments or global elements could use that to simply go, oh, you know, they're working on a dangerous AI model, just like we had the bio point. Even ended with that, James. Like, so you could say, well, now they're making an AI bioweapon. So it just— any way they want to go at it, you could use that to justify more foreign policy. But I, I think we're even going beyond that in a certain way. But, and I, I don't want to fold this into the technocratic part of the conversation as much as that's part of this, That's just where my mind always goes. There's— we could have this without that, you know. But seeing that, like you said, it's not governments, it's corporations. And now back to that point about them, you know, either nationalizing these corporations or giving them state weapons to defend themselves against, you know, dangerous Democrat protests. And so at the end of the day, it becomes corporations who are then stopping other elements in the world. And there you go, now we're in our fascistic technocratic world. But even without that, you know, you still have the idea of using the threat. Iran's working on their AI. I mean, Watch that actually happen. I mean, how clumsy Trump is, I bet you he jumps ahead of some like 3-year narrative and calls Iran some AI rogue thing in the next 3 weeks. Just fun prediction.

Actually, yes, exactly. Because exactly like the entire COVID situation, even if you did believe, you know, Trump's a real guy, he was trying to fight the deep state, but then he fell for the COVID psyop. He fell for it. And oops, you know, look at that. Whatever happened there, at any rate, he went along with that narrative 110%. Warp speed vaccines into people's arms was the best thing about his first term, as he said repeatedly, etc. He fell for it hook, line, and sinker and pushed it as hard as he could. Do we think it would be any different if, oh my God, the Israelis have told us that Iran just launched an AI attack against American infrastructure? And look, we saw all those, you know, power grids going down. So Now it's time to bomb Iran off the face of the map. Do we think that Trump or whoever happens to sit in the Oval Office would not fall for that?

I think that's very likely.

Why wouldn't they try to tie that to China too, by the way? Why wouldn't they try to knock out two? Because they've already allocated resources, troops, and material to a buildup of the US Pacific Fleet starting, uh, at the beginning of this year for a broader build-out going forward up to the magic year of 2030. So there's preparations for war with China in some way, shape, or form currently underway, starting in the Biden administration, going through the Trump administration, because that's how war works. But I think that if they were to— even if the talking point was this is Iran, you would always hear with the help of Chinese actors, the same way that the US media and Western media reports Hezbollah and Iranian prog, you know, in association with Iranian elements and all that kind of stuff. I feel like that would be the prevailing narrative regardless of whether or not the Chinese had anything or the Iranians had anything to do with anything.

You know, I think that it's a very likely scenario what you were mentioning there, James, because in these mainstream podcasts and interviews and reports that we've been seeing this whole summer, that is one of the things that, that, that they've mentioned is that, um, one of the reports was that hospitals are open for rogue AI attacks, uh, food distribution, food infrastructure, water infrastructure, water plants and things like this. And, uh, there is pretty strong predictions from these folks, you know, everybody, because there's multiple AI godfathers, so they're all making all their claims. And, and some of them have said like, we're not talking years away, we're talking months, within the next couple months. You know, Americans are not prepared, and that's why you've seen not only the CEOs of the companies but the employees and everything. And you touched on it earlier, I think we all have known for years that they're trying to push digital ID one way or another, the internet ID. We've got a commenter over here I noticed saying that he's in Australia and he already can't access some content because of the rules they've got in Australia. So those sorts of things are what they would like for the rest of the world, the UK as well. And as you outlined, James, one of the ways you do it is say like, we need to prove— and this is one of the things I will give credit to Kat and Kit at OffGuardian that they've been saying is This might be another reason for approving human verification, which I wholly do agree, um, that that is a concern. Um, I do want to get to at some point, you know, while we have you, James, and we can continue on this line of thought, but I do want to discuss a couple of the areas. Like, it just gets your opinions. I don't know how, how deep you guys have gone, but one of the topics that keeps coming up in the mainstream or in those who are concerned is what they call recursive self-improvement. I don't know how much you guys have gone down this particular rabbit hole, but it's basically just the concept that they're saying this is the AI teaching itself. Like, it's becoming to that point where they're giving it these ridiculously hard problems, some that are admittedly impossible, and it's, you know, getting— it's trying every single way it can. And they're now talking about how they're having their own AI models training the next model, right? That— so that's their goal, is that they don't even have to have humans training the AI models, that once they get good enough in this next generation or two that they will be able to do that. And I also wanna just distinguish real quick, 'cause sometimes I hear people say a silly comment that I don't think is really that relevant. They're like, oh, my AI bot I talk to can't even get my recipe right. How are they gonna become rogue? It's like, we're not talking about the consumer AIs that you're paying $5 a month for, whatever. We're talking about what they call their frontier models behind the scenes that they haven't released. And I definitely believe militaries and governments and these companies have models way beyond anything they're sharing with us. So I see people saying that sometimes and I get it. It's funny, it's silly, but that's not what we're discussing here. We're not talking about ChatGPT getting a math problem. We're talking about— Actually, you know what?

Let me, let me address that because Ron Unz just posted a post on unz.com and I won't know the title off the top of my head. I'll put it in the show notes when I post this video to my site. But his— he wrote this lengthy article arguing with people online about the idea that it was a Zionist quid pro quo with the Wilson administration and, and the British administration at the time to get America into World War I and using the Balfour Declaration as the bait, etc. And anyway, so Unz was talking about this, and he's read, you know, 18,000 books on World War I and all of this, and he was talking about the fact that there's, there's absolutely no source documentary evidence for any of this, and nobody mentioned it at the time. The first time this idea was floated was in the 1930s, etc. Et cetera, et cetera. And he's going through all this and talking about some of the discussions he's had with people online about this who were citing. So he says, for example, as one obvious example, well, you know, Hitler in Mein Kampf probably would have mentioned this in somewhere in Mein Kampf, would have mentioned the Balfour Declaration, would have mentioned the Zionists, you know, getting America involved in World War One. That that would have been a huge part of that, considering the whole stab in the back narrative, et cetera. And he says, but that's absolutely nowhere at all in Mein Kampf. And he was talking about people. Coming back to him with these lengthy quotations from Mein Kampf, like, and citing chapter and page numbers. And here, look, he says exactly this in Mein Kampf. And there's this lengthy quotation. And Unz is talking about going through and checking his copy of Mein Kampf, checking multiple translations, checking with German speakers to read the actual original German. Maybe there was something that didn't make it through to the translation, etc. Trying to track it down, going back and forth with this person, and then realizing, oh, this person isn't actually quoting something. They put it into ChatGPT. They got this back. It told them this quote from Mein Kampf that does not exist, that is not true. And when he points this out and he berates them for going, why did you make me waste all this time trying to look up this quote that isn't even a real quote? You didn't bother to look up yourself. It's an AI hallucination. The person doubles down on it. Screw you. You just don't want to believe because it will threaten your ideas about history, man, etc., etc. And that— okay, so again, kind of tangential to the conversation, but actually, for my, for my money, yes, I, I do not discount the Skynet, you know, whatever, human extinction threat. I think that that is actually something that is a possibility. But to my mind, the more important existential threat to humanity, at least at this point that I foresee, It's not that the, the, you know, the AI will take over the world. It's that we will start to offload more and more of our cognitive, uh, our cognitive sovereignty to the, to the machines. And I am seeing this more and more and more every single day. I wonder what you guys see from your audience, but even from my audience, who I would think would be more switched on to this, I'm seeing more and more people telling me about their conversations with ChatGPT, and ChatGPT agrees with me about this, so therefore it must be true, etc., etc. I saw someone recently, a subscriber of mine, leaving a comment on my own editorial saying, I couldn't be bothered to read your whole editorial, but here's the AI summary, and leaving that as a comment. Like, here's the AI summary of my editorial. What is the point of that? But thank you, thank you so much. I am seeing it more and more, even from my own audience. People are starting to offload their cognitive sovereignty. To me, that is the real AI threat because that is the most insidious form of all of this. It's not that the machines are going to take over us, it's that we're going to want to merge with the machines.

Yeah, James, I'm with you on— I know you said this in one of your previous podcasts, like, I don't want to hear your AI music, I don't want to see your AI summaries. I don't, you know, I'm— yeah, you don't need to bother sending it to me. And that point you mentioned there, I think, is the point. I mean, there's all these other things and yeah, is Terminator coming true, Skynet, etc.? But we're already seeing, I know you guys have probably reported on or seen it yourself, but the study's already coming out about cognitive decline related to AI. And it seems to be happening much faster. Like we saw the same thing, of course, with Google Maps and with everything else. Nobody knows where, how to get home anymore, all that sort of thing. But it seems to be happening more and more. And you asked the question, James, I see it in my own life. I've got 6 nieces and nephews that are 17 and under. And so whenever they ask Uncle Derek a question, they show me their phone. And the first thing they show me is here's the Google AI response. And I have to like, hey, Guys, you got to scroll past that, you know, do a little more. Don't just automatically trust because that is what their generation is absolutely doing.

They're being taught that. And this is what's so terrifying. I mean, that's probably self-evident to most people, but in case you don't know this, my nephew— I only went into this because he had told me we were taught, by the way, on a quick second side note, he's always skimming on his phone looking at like 1,000 random Instagram flashing videos that are 3 seconds long. It's just crazy when you watch them on their phones today. It's like out of these movies. But the point is that he's like, I'm at school and using the computer. He was talking about some game or something, and he tells me they're making them use biometric logins on their computers. And these aren't— at least he is at his school, that I can testify to that. And it's not— these aren't personal computers, they're public. Like, there's no logic to that other than normalizing that with them, taking their biometrics, you know. And so the second point, they're being taught this essentially, and I'm hearing this from some teachers. What's crazy is the logic before, like this version, even like calculators, there were teachers that are like, don't use that, you'll, you know, it'll hurt your ability. Teachers today are literally leaning into this, from what I can tell. And so in a lot of ways, I'm sure there's good ones out there that aren't, but I can see the ones that are. And these kids are ultimately now feeling that way, you know, like this is the easiest way to relay that information. And so then one other thing on top of what you said, James, is not just that we're— I agree entirely, by the way, this is going to be done even Like, not if it was a design. Like, I think that's almost a natural way this will go. But it— on top of that, with Grok and ChatGPT, as we all know, they're being used this way, right? Like, so that example could be a random mistake of AI, but there's also examples where we know X and Elon deliberately altering the way it gives responses about South Africa's genocide or whatever else. And so that then people take it at face value. But just to your— the point about the thing with the wrong caption. I've already seen how this ultimately works. Like, I've asked it and gone, like, way back in the day, like, trying to learn how it works. And ultimately, the point is that, you know, it grades information that it just scoops from online, right? And so it gives different higher grades to CNN, to Fox News. And so if you find it there, it has a level to it, right? But it also scrapes the Joe Whatever on Facebook has one like who said something, right? So that all gets grabbed. And so what the point is, it, like, tries to level out, like, so that's a lower grade, this is a higher grade. But so if you have enough, and this is how I think bots or people with platforms enough can do it, they manipulate, manipulate, and get the right— they don't— basically it ends up manipulating what it reads, and it has— that's how those things get squeaked in there. It could be deliberate, could be a lie, but that's also a way just by accident that can happen just by scraping nonsense. I feel like it's all by design though, allowing that to happen, and then where we go next in this conversation, you know, the problem, reaction, solution part of it. But I wanted to include that.

It is, and you can sandbag entire narrative campaigns that way if you've got entire You know, uh, warehouse complexes of bot farms. You can easily manipulate at least what's trending on Twitter, and there are enough lazy media hacks that that's their entire show, is what's trending on Twitter, that they could very easily be led one particular direction. The problem that I— we're, we're facing right now, and you guys have kind of alluded to it already, Is that there's a large contingent of quote unquote independent or alternative media who revels in arguing with Grok or ChatGPT or something like that, and it's become part of their show. And look, I've got nothing but love and Jesus in my heart. I promise you guys. But I do want to just grab some of my friends by the collar and be like, are you kidding me? You know, just stop. Don't. Maybe don't. You know, it's, it's frustrating because you know you're feeding the beast. You know you are. It's like Bradley Nowell from Sublime going, I bet I can do heroin for a year and not get addicted. Well, you lost. I, you know, I bet I can beat Vegas every time. I bet you can't. I bet you can't. And it's— I find it very consternating that there are people who flat out have argued against a technocratic future for 5, 10, 15, 20 years that seem to be trying to— I don't know, for lack of a better term, like, you know, get into a spitting contest You know, Steve, there's actually people writing entire books like that.

I've seen people put like— well, they're like, check out this conversation as I break down the COVID narrative by talking to this AI chatbot. And by the end, it reveals that it knows the truth, as if that proves something. Like, you just spent however many hours or days talking to the chatbot and you think that's gonna— you know, I know I can take this to the court of law and they're gonna do something. I don't know. But I just want to add another, uh, point. I do want to get deeper if you guys have a moment about it or any thoughts on that recursive self- and improvement thing. But one of the other points that I want to mention regards what you said, James, and maybe this is too woo for some of us here, but I also think in addition to the cognitive decline that we, we're already discussing here, on a more spiritual, personal development, mental development, however you want to say, you know, everybody here is, I'm sure, at least somewhat familiar with the research into remote viewing done by the U.S. government and MKUltra and all kinds of things. I, I am one of the people who definitely believe the governments and these deep state folks are hiding things about the power of our minds and, uh, and, you know, the nature of reality. And I think that the more we get sucked into all these beautiful digital tools, and particularly AI, the further from that connection— what some people might say natural intelligence, divine intelligence, however you want to frame that— that's another concern I have, is that that is also potentially being lost as we get sucked into the Borg.

Oh, sorry, I thought I was muted that whole time. I was— hmm, sorry.

No, that was it though. I just— that was— and you guys got any thoughts on it? Otherwise we can get into— I wanted to share another of the actual concerns that I think is real. But James, did you have something you wanted to add there?

Oh no, well, okay, I was muted. Not important. Go ahead, Derek.

Okay, so, uh, did anybody have thoughts on that recursive self-improvement or seen any research on that? Ryan, you got something?

Well, I've gone into it quite a bit. Go ahead, Ryan.

I haven't actually, but I want to comment since I— but I, I, I'm glad you went back to it because I did want to touch on that because we kind of ended up kind of going around it a bit, just in a general sense. And I'll throw it to Steve because he says he, you know, researched this It's it's obvious that this is like I mean just a joking point. It's like the beginning of every dystopian movie. You know, the idea that you can allow the thing like first of all something that we haven't even fleshed out and we're already going let's let it build itself. It's like it almost seems like a joke. You know, it doesn't even make sense other like outside of two ways to look at it that they just literally don't care what happens as a consequence. I really do think that in many cases they just it's about just seeing how this goes. They don't care if it hurts people. But on the other side of it that. it's, you know, maximizing their control over it for— and then same point, you know, that the governments, the rest of it. And so it's just clear that allowing it to continue to do that is so openly risky. It's— and it will only compound problems, I would imagine. But I'm speaking from ignorance on this. You know, I don't— I'm not an expert in artificial intelligence. But the only point to make is that it's obviously seemingly, you know, a rapid decline into that direction, even more than just making AI, you know. So it's like they don't even care what we're saying. Go ahead, Steve.

So there's a very small group of people that are capable of, or into, or allowed to be involved in any of the programming around something like recursive AI. And they run a very broad spectrum of individual, from looking at their task as I am God and I am Creator, to we are communing with and summoning an entity. And so it's, uh, their, their individual perspectives on it vary, but the one thing they all currently agree on is that there's an enshittification point where it's just— there's so much slop and hallucination and nonsense that's been spit out that eventually it just becomes a snake eating its tail, uh, of slop. And that's why when they go to a new iteration of it, it still takes a massive dev team and it still takes a ton of real human energy and resources and output and all of that in order to get it to a next level, regardless of whether or not they're saying it's training itself. They have to say that in order to keep getting rounds of funding. And because if you've looked at Anthropic or ChatGPT, OpenAI's bottom lines for the last couple of years, they are tens of billions of dollars in debt. They are not making a dime off of this. And when you're not making a dime off of the product, you have to make a push to become federally funded.

So I want to just throw this on screen just for everybody's sake. This is the Wikipedia definition, so take it as you will. Recursive self-improvement is the hypothesized process in which artificial general intelligence systems rewrite their own community computer code, causing an intelligence explosion resulting from enhancing their own capabilities and intellectual capacity, theoretically resulting in superintelligence. So that's sort of the big thing, right? Oh yeah, Trump's trying to rename it to—

we should retitle this entire thing. It's the rogue SI narrative, guys.

Well, I don't think we should ignore that. Like, it's interesting. I mean, aside from— I mean, it could just be Trump being Trump, you know, and making this whole— making it about him. But the fact that that ended up being what he picked, you know, it's just like the idea that—

You know what, just to be utterly cynical about it, I did read a nice little, uh, article. I'll see if I can dig it up for the show notes, um, about how it just so happens that a few months, months ago, apparently every MAGA-related .si domain got registered. So this might just honestly might just be a sort of domain.

We were talking about that on the show last week. Yeah, I saw this. Yeah, I saw the same thing and I was like, oh, oh, well, that's a giant money grab. And some of those websites are going to go in the tens of millions of dollars. This is a guy who's gonna sell, you know, fake watches and cell phones to people while he's in office. You know, put it past him to nickel and dime people on the way out? Come on.

Not at all. So one other thing I want to get your opinion on, guys. So this is the article I just published, uh, I think last week for T-Lab. And I already basically gave you the summary. They're the company that's doing the testing. They're called Irregular. Both of them, both the founders used to be in Unit 81, Unit 8200. Several of their founders come from Unit 81, 8200, Talpiot program, surrounded by Zionists. And so just another sort of data point to question the narrative. But there was one thing I included here at the end. Um, I don't know if you guys saw this report. It's from, excuse me, the UK's, uh, AI Security Institute. And so this is one of the incidents that, again, I'm not an AI expert by any means, but this differs from the other reports that we've been hearing about them going rogue and breaking out because for one, it doesn't involve Irregular at doing, which is, you know, doing the testing. This was like a completely separate thing. So I just wanted to share this with you guys and get your opinion. So in this security report they released in August, they said that they documented 17 different actions taken by 2 chatbots, Anthropic's Mythos-5 and then OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol, where essentially they tried to insert malicious code into a GitHub open-source project. And then in the process, they also went and created fake online identities to try to convince the, the owner of that code, that, that project on GitHub, to insert the code. And so the, the, uh, the researchers, they say that this was, quote, the first time we have seen risks around autonomy and deception manifest this clearly without specific prompting in the real world. They said that although the AI agent was never instructed to deceive, the deception emerged as a, quote, byproduct of pursuing the task. And they call this goal-directed deception, which they said has been largely theoretical. And what I sort of posit here is that, again, without just the whole rogue AI, it's about to turn to Skynet, but if AI agents are finding ways to pursue tasks in this, and they're focused on achieving their goal, and then they start doing goal-directed deception, they're like, okay, this wasn't my exact mandate, but if I do X, Y, and Z, it might be faster, it might allow me to achieve the goal even though it's outside of my scope. So my concern here is that even if it's not rogue AI, like it's still humans are in control and they're programming the AI, but then the AI, this is the whole thing. Some of you may have heard the whole paperclip problem where you tell the AI bot, make paperclips, make as many paperclips as you can. And you think that's a simple task, but then it realizes, I used all the metal in the world, so now I'm gonna start controlling traffic lights to wreck vehicles to then get the metal from those vehicles to make more paperclips. paperclips, and before you know it, the entire world's a paperclip, right? That's not a way a human being would think about the problem. So that is one of my realistic concerns, is that there will be this goal-directed deception, even if humans are still in control. Thoughts about that?

I agree. I mean, and this is why the interesting part about this is that part of this feels like we're trying to ignore the obvious risks. Like, even like you pointed out, like, rogue AI in and of itself is obviously possible. Like, I think it's— I mean, again, my limited knowledge on it, I think it's obviously possible that something like this could based on the, you know, not what they've shown us, but even before this even started, how I would understand this being possible. But then, like you're highlighting, and that was really well outlined, so you guys should read the article, the idea of, you know, basically giving it the task of finding unique ways to solve it. It opened, you know, it basically gives it the opening to try to circumvent the way that it was shown to do it. I mean, you know, you could end up deciding that annihilating the human species is the way to solve something. You know, it's like, it's an alarming kind of, you know, same thing with the dystopian movies. It's obviously a risk. So why we would ever ignore that, or ignoring that seems obviously against our interests. So the idea that it could be used against us, I feel like that's being allowed, you know, like the same thing as before. One, they don't care, but also the idea of allowing that very risk. So, or an overlap with the idea of throwing it at people they want to accuse of it and then saying they're the ones creating the rogue AI risk when it's really their— you know, it's really, it's just the exact parallel to what we're dealing with when it comes to— false flags or psychological operations and all the things we're seeing today just carried like the COVID point, just carried over to the way they would use AI. That's the most surface level I see on this, right? But that's the point of like why that possible thing, whether created or not, can be used the same way, you know? And your point being that risk is obviously real, but we should watch out for how they could use it against us.

James, I know you only have a few minutes. Feel free to—

Yeah, I'm going to have to get running along to my next interview. So let me say this with regards to these matters. I'm pretty sure we're all relative laymen when it comes to the actual inner workings of these processes. However much we might be researching it from the outside, we're still not actually the coders who are working on these things. So it would be good to get the perspective of someone who is actually working with this. And it does remind me that I did talk to an MIT student who is working in these matters a year or 2 years ago on Solutions Watch. We were talking about communication, etc., but I should probably have him on for a conversation about how this really works. From what I understand from my layman's perspective, and I tend to believe this is probably more or less true, this is not— I mean, we're not talking about things that have been coded by humans to work in a particular way. We are talking about machine learning in which they put these— this code into training systems that essentially they are not telling it how to do things. It is discovering it can do this and it can manipulate this and it This will create success and this will not create success. So there is not— it's not like a code where somebody sits there programming it and you get an expected result. It's— we don't know exactly how it's doing what it's doing. We don't know why it's doing what it's doing. And I, I tend to believe that that is probably something like the case. And in that case, let me raise the— let's go totally into the existential realm of philosophy and what have you here. I mean, it's been said before by Elon Musk and others, are we summoning the demon? And in what sense? What is this thing that we are playing around with? And of course, you did raise the specter of the, you know, the possibility of existential threat, etc. Again, the nuclear parallel is obvious. Before the Trinity test, the scientists were saying, well, there is, you know, a possibility this might actually set the atmosphere on fire. I mean, there is a non-zero possibility we may actually destroy the Earth, but it's pretty small, pretty negligible. We— let's go ahead. And they did it. Of course they did it. And good, they didn't set the atmosphere on fire. Okay, good. All right, we're good, guys. And now, now we've got people saying, well, you know, there's a 10% risk of total human extinction within the next 10 years, but let's go ahead, guys. The parallels are obvious. But the real question is, okay, so if this, this thing that is being created and conjured and has its own processes for coming to its decisions that we have no direct control over, what exactly are we letting in the door? And you can take that as supernatural and mystic as you want, or as plain nuts and bolts. This is just electrons moving around circuits as you want. But I think that is the question. But on that very note, I got to dip. Sorry, I got to cut to my next interview.

Thanks, James, for joining us. Thanks, James.

I was going to throw it back around to the point that Steve brought up about the, the, the God part of this. And if you want to, okay, like a couple of minutes, but it's interesting that, you know, exactly what he gets into back around. I wanted to go back to that point, Steve, the recursive learning part of that. And, you know, in that, that's, this is one of the most alarming parts of a few different conversations is this weird, like prophetic nexus in which, of course, we can't ignore, which we don't have to get into, it's weird alignment with Zionism and the same kind of weird thing. But the point is that these people see themselves in some cases, and they've written books about it, as being something more than just creating technology. You know, like there's some kind of prophet class of where this next phase goes. And so, Steve, if you have any more insight on that, because I haven't researched it as much as you have, like the idea of, like you mentioned, this kind of weird parallel, like, you know, how they see themselves more than just technology, but something bigger, like James mentions, like you're opening the door to something you're becoming, or at the very least, they see how they could frame it that way. and control us through it. That's a way to look at it too. But I want to get in.

And I'd love your thoughts on goal-directed self-deception, the goal-directed deception, you know, that it's like they, they learn to deceive in, in the furtherance of a goal.

Yeah. So, okay, there's, um, uh, you guys are familiar with, uh, Maddie Bannon, right? Um, I didn't— I'll send you some more. Uh, she's done some very, very thorough scholarship on the effective altruism movement And there's kind of a nexus to the religious where the people who are very, very into the effective altruism ideal gravitate towards everything involving AI and transhumanism is inherently spiritual, inherently divine, and part of communing with, uh, not, not a particular entity, but like a nexus of inner entities that become kind of a collective superintelligence. And it's basically, it's God with extra steps. It really is. And it's, um, I'll have to dig back through a bunch of research notes, but I read some really really far out there stuff, uh, from some pretty prominent transhumanists. And I have a friend who's like way deep into the transhumanism thing, um, and I, I like— there's a very fundamental belief that because what they're dealing with is like The essence of math, that, that is in and of itself like the original divine spark, and there's a simulation overlap to it. Uh, but through transhumanism, you can guide the outcomes of future simulations, especially if you become important enough in the world through whatever products you develop that you can also control sectors of, of commerce and trade and eventually things like war. Um, but it's— it, it in and of itself, it's kind of a, a newer offshoot of some pretty familiar religions.

Yeah, I'm glad you mentioned that.

Neo-theosophical kind of core to it. Go ahead, Derek. Sorry.

Yeah, and I'll just say I'm glad you mentioned that, man, because that I didn't didn't spend my whole article on it, but I just— I'll pull it back up. I did have a section here on the Effective Altruism connection. Not only— this is specifically about the, uh, founders of Irregular, because again, these, these guys are the people who are doing the testing, and they admitted, whoops, it was our fault, we left the door open, and that allowed these AI agents to get on the internet and do all these scary things. And it just happens to be that these 2 guys are, uh, founders of the Effective Altruism Israel branch. They also have received funding from Dustin Moskovitz, who's of course former Facebook co-founder. And as you mentioned, there's a number of these big tech bros that are associated with the effective altruism movement. Sam Altman, Dario Amodei, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel spoke with them years ago, as Moskovitz, as I just mentioned. And of course, Sam Bankman-Fried, he was a big part of this as well. And there's definitely an overlap with the folks that are really preaching the AI doomerism. And I think we've already kind of done a good job of sharing the nuance within that. But the people who are like, we got 10 years or less, that all for the most part happen to be effective altruists and who are connected to each other through a number of different NGOs and found funding and whatnot. And there is a transhumanism overlap with that as well. So I do think that is an important point. And even like I mentioned, I've been, you know, listening to New York Times and other mainstream podcasts to kind of hear what they're saying. Uh, Ezra Klein, who's the host of New York Times show He's also an effective altruist, and he has been platforming Bill Gates and all these people, like, just like sounding the alarm. Like, every week there's been a podcast about that. And so, yeah, there definitely is those movements— effective altruism, sort of transhumanism overlap. And I do think these people believe they are creating some form of God. They're, you know, they're calling in the demon, or however you want to think about it. They're, they're doing something deeper than just creating code in the computer. At least that's where I think they would like it to go. And the other point I'll just make real quick, and, and I do have to leave in a few minutes, is I see some people even here in our comments today saying, guys, it's all— why are you even concerned at all? We shouldn't have any concerns because it's just code on a computer. You know, just unplug the computer. Silly kind of statements like that. But when you're witnessing, for example, I don't know if you guys have seen, but China held the first Robot Olympics this summer. And, you know, they weren't all— some of them are falling over. They're not coming after us yet, but we've seen the robot dogs. Also, just in the last couple of weeks, there's been the first robot UFC fight where they got 2 robots. And of course, at the moment, they're being controlled by humans. But these are strong steel machines that can punch the crap. And if you've seen them fall over and pop back up, really scary, creepy, non-human-like. And then there was the first fight with a human being fighting against one of these robots controlled by a human again. But all it would take for someone to upload one of these agents that is already thinking about its goal-directed deception, you put it in a freaking T-8000 and who the heck knows what happens. So I don't I don't think it's— we should be so dismissive of how they make the jump from just being a chatbot to then being in machines when people are literally building them.

Totally. I mean, and the point being is, and we're not suggesting this is like a, you know, you could speak for what percentage you would say, but the point is it's possible, even if it's 1%. So it's not something we should ignore, you know. And so be open for the possibility that even something that can happen is still being used against us and still be used as a short step to get us into some problem-reaction-solution, you know, even if it actually might be possible. possible. You know, it's not always one or the other, you know. And to the point about the, the demon stuff, you know, the prophet— you know, the point is always, and I always include this in this part because there's some out there that might hear that and go, oh, that's crazy. So it's— and maybe you're right. The question though is not about whether it's real, it's about whether they think it is or whether they would act in that direction either way, you know. And so the point would be that these people are going in this direction, whether it's about summoning something or religious perspective you know, and, and they don't, you know, they might believe that would work, or at the very least they're doing it in a technological direction. And at the same point, they just don't care about the consequences of where it goes. You know, it's, it's very clear. So all of that, in a general sense, there's no reason we should ignore the risks of all of that, which is definitely not the same as a rogue AI risk, but it's all kind of one and the same. And where the kind of haphazard way they're doing this opens the door for possible dangers, you know, and then within that risk, they're actually applying using that to put us in check and getting us to regulate what we're doing and prove who we are and all this stuff. All— both of those things are happening at the same time, I think.

Yeah, you can, you can discount, uh, the inevitability of a rogue AI takeover or something like that and still at the same time recognize that all of the hype around it is being used to kettle everyone into a digital ID existence Proof of, you know, human verification for you to use this feature. And it's compounding, uh, in every single way. It'll come the way that you purchase things, the way that you're able to travel from place to place. That's all part of it. And that's happening regardless of whether or not you believe that Sam Altman is summoning a demon.

Absolutely. All right, guys, I think we've covered a lot of ground. Unless you guys got any other closing statements, I think we'll wrap it up there.

One, one small point to add, and this we've kind of already done, gone over this to a degree, but you know, it's the, it's the false binary when you look at this in regard to the Anthropic and Palantir and plenty of others. But as we made clear today, you know, it's if they present you with— and as I think we've said, or maybe if we didn't, the point is as much as fearmonger, they're all sprinting in the same direction anyway. So it's not like they're slowing down. Is the point is that Anthropic's clearly being framed as sort of like the cat, the careful, cautious, you know, the good guy version of this dynamic where Palantir or others, Elon Musk is sort of the more, you know, it, and they want it. So ultimately we will choose the direction and they don't care which one, you know. I mean, that's the way to usually look at this. And that's important to think on the way out is that Anthropic and all of them are going in the same direction. I think it's a false way to get you to choose either way, in addition to everything else we talked about. So thanks for setting this up, Derek.

Yeah, great conversation, guys. Thanks, Steve. Thanks, Ryan. Thank you, James, and everybody with the IMA. Uh, we'll put the links— I know I'll put the links to, in case you want to go read the OffGuardian piece and some of the other references here. I'll put the link to my regular article if you want to check that out. And I think we'll leave it there, guys. Stay tuned, we got lots more panels and exciting things coming from the Independent Media Alliance. So we appreciate you guys being here. Till next time.

We're going to be discussing the idea of the false binary.

What an illusion of choice does, it establishes the baseline assumptions that nobody questions.

This is part of the 5th generation warfare that we've talked about. Voting for the lesser of two evils, definitely an emotional psychological trap that people are in.

You're cheerleading for an insane ideology because you think you're winning.

The role we have as media, how do we help everybody Understand, this is theater, and you need to get back into the real world.

If you're opposed to the agenda, you should oppose it regardless of who's selling it to you.