Episode Details
Back to Episodes“plzdontkillus Fellows Got ~2M AI Safety Views, Not 21M” by Josh Thorsteinson
Description
Summary
I was a fellow at plzdontkillus, a month-long creator bootcamp at Lighthaven, partially funded by MIRI, where ~55 fellows posted one video per day.
plzdontkillus.com originally claimed “21M+ AI risk views” with no breakdown. After I shared a draft of this post, the organizers relabeled it “X-Risk Relevant Views” and published one.
Three videos account for 80% of the views: a datacenter-water-use debunk (8.5M), an AI dystopia video (6.4M), and a Rob Miles Hugging Face incident explainer (2.5M). The rest total 4.3M. Under my stricter definition of AI safety content, fellows generated ~2 million views total.
Based on my analysis, fellow-made AI safety videos made up around ¼ of fellows’ output and ~2% of total views. 13 out of ~55 fellows posted zero AI safety videos, and an additional 8 posted only one or two.
This is partly because the program didn't incentivize AI safety content. If they run it again, I think they should change that.
Me
I’m Josh Thor.
- I was a fellow
- Like every fellow, plzdontkillus offered me a $2000 stipend and free room and board for the month (which I accepted)
- I won the program's “Other” category for [...]
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Outline:
(00:13) Summary
(01:28) Me
(02:12) What they claim
(05:26) My analysis
(06:58) Program incentives
(08:38) Aella's response
(11:00) My recommendation
The original text contained 11 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.
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First published:
September 17th, 2026
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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