“plzdontkillus Fellows Got ~2M AI Safety Views, Not 21M” by Josh Thorsteinson

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

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LQ9wKT9oNeArbwukz/plzdontkillus-fellows-got-2m-ai-safety-views-not-21m

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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