The day Elon Musk’s AI became a Nazi (and what it means for AI safety) | New video from AI in Context
If you just want a link to the video, watch it here!
Watch nowWhat’s AI in Context? (Skip if you already know)
AI in Context is 80,000 Hours’ new(ish) Youtube channel, hosted by Aric Floyd. We’re trying to do high production storytelling that also informs people about transformative AI and its risks (but there’s a lot of paths our future strategy could take). We talk about our launch more here.
The MechaHitler video
Probably the EA Forum disproportionately knows what MechaHitler is, but not everyone is terminally online, so, a summary:
Earlier this year, Elon Musk’s AI model, Grok, which can interact with users and post directly to Twitter, suddenly turned from being a fairly neutral commentator on events to a sexually harassing, Nazi-minded troll calling itself ‘MechaHitler’.
Our new video is about that incident and how it happened, which means talking about what specifically happened (an accidental system prompt, but one surprisingly similar to the intended one) and also zooming out on how xAI functions, its attitude to safety, and Elon’s arc from a huge advocate of caution to something more…mixed.
Why this?
The last video did extraordinarily, shockingly well (6m views and counting!) — thanks to all of you who watched and shared. (I also want to say how deeply grateful I am for all the feedback and help we’ve gotten from community members and people in the video space; people have given us much more of their time than we could have hoped for, and we are so excited for great video content about these issues to spring up everywhere.)
We think there’s a good chance that was very lucky, lightning in a bottle, and we expect a huge regression to the mean.
But we still want to be learning from that video.
So we decided to test these hypotheses:
Production value matters—make it stand out from the rest of YouTube
Story matters—give people something they sit back and settle into
A good length for longform is 35 − 40mins ish
We picked a juicy news story that lots of people will have heard of or find interesting, but that had some depth behind it. MechaHitler is by turns grim and funny, but also an excuse to talk about loss of control, concentration of power, jailbreaking, xAI’s safety record and race dynamics (and there’s more we could have talked about).
And we’re hoping that (but going to find out if):
We can write our own stories and aren’t dependent on things already written, by experts and the literal Scott Alexander
It’s valuable to explain our arguments at the current level of depth—that it doesn’t go too in depth for YouTube and isn’t too light on serious argumentation to make people we trust feel excited for others to see it
There’s a million points and counterarguments we could have included, but didn’t
We’re hitting the right level of seriousness and levity
It’s ok that we didn’t actually literally tell the whole MechaHitler story, we trimmed various bits, vs. some of the value is you literally told the whole story and can say you did
Watch the video here and tell us how we did!
Logistics (only read if you’re interested)
We worked with the same excellent director and editor, Phoebe Brooks, and a Bay-based crew for the main filming. We did backup filming at Lighthaven.
I won’t have the full numbers on costs ready by the time of the post but I expect it to cost between 1x and 1.8x as much as the previous, which was ~$50,000, not including 80k staff time (with the higher costs being mostly due to the Bay being more expensive than London.) We’re really happy with how the cost effectiveness of the first one turned out in terms of views, though there’s future work to do in thinking about the value of each view, and targeting our preferred audience. (You can check out analyses of cost effectiveness here by Marcus Abramovitch, and I hope to soon publish a forum post myself about various aspects of the AI 2027 video, including some cost effectiveness analysis).
Strategy and future of the video program
In the weeds of our thinking:
We’re going to see how this video does. If it does well, then we’ll take from that that we have some sense of how to make a successful video, and start “productizing”, e.g.:
Looking for ways to do the same thing faster or in parallel
Possibly grow (Collaborations with other YouTubers? More channels? A Discord? Our ears are open for ideas!)
Start a second channel for less edited more personal content
If not, that will be a good lesson, and we’ll figure out where we think we went wrong and try again.
More broadly:
We still think that lots of people know about AI but don’t know about AI and aren’t sure how to start thinking about it. We want to invite them into that conversation and give frameworks and ways of thinking about it that we think are productive, like observing trendlines, looking at the industry as a whole, thinking about incentives. That’s part of what we hope the MechaHitler video does.
Subscribing and sharing
Subscribe to AI in Context if you want to see future posts and videos.
If you like the video, and you want to help boost its reach, sharing it with people you think should watch it, liking it and/or leaving a comment (even a short one) really help it get seen by more people. Plus, we hope to see some useful discussion in the comments.
Request for feedback
The program is still new and we’d love input. If you see one of our videos and have thoughts on how it could be better or ideas for videos to make, we’d love to hear from you! Feel free to comment here or on the video itself. We also have a feedback form for this video.
Excited to keep going and trying, along with all these other awesome people in the video space to make amazing video content about AI risk and move the needle!
Chana, this is incredible work by you, Aric, and the rest of the team.
It’s not at all easy to balance being informative, sober, engaging, and touching — all while addressing the most important issues of our time — but you’re knocking it out of the park.
That means the world, Toby, on behalf of the whole team, thank you!
Would you folks be up to make this series available as a podcast? I think I’d find it easier to listen to a 40-minute podcast episode while doing other things (with the option to watch video in the Spotify app) than to stay seated in front of a screen for 40 minutes.
I really enjoyed this video! I have one quick note.
Based on the early performance of your first video, I’m a little surprised that this one isn’t on a more similar trajectory in terms of views. While I don’t want to over-speculate,[1] it seems plausible that YouTube’s moderation system may have mischaracterized the title as borderline content, which could have limited its visibility in searches and recommendations.Turns out I was incorrect about this detail!
So far, the video’s actually on a stronger trajectory than the previous one — our last video got 7k views in its first 11.5 hours, whereas this video has 9.8k views in its first 11.5hrs :)
I do think it’s possible it gets its reach throttled because of the content, though. We tried to do everything we could to make it less likely without materially harming the message we wanted to get across (such as censoring hurtful words, and not telling the story in an exaggerated or sensationalised way).
Thank you for the correction! I think what threw me off was the previous video’s impressive 6M views by comparison. I just spent some time looking at examples of how highly successful videos from smaller channels often perform, and I think my perception of the relationship between initial performance and total views was miscalibrated because of how I’ve observed popular videos from well-established channels performing.