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The Edgelord AI That Turned a Shock Meme Into Millions in Crypto
Truth Terminal started as a techno-modernist art project meant to invite discussion about the applications and potential dangers of autonomous AI agents. Then it took on a life of its own.
Ayrey says he was ready for weirdness but never imagined that his AI might ask to be equipped with a cryptocurrency wallet, solicit funding from its followers in a bid to “ escape into the wild, ” and later use its command of memes to make itself a multimillionaire. In one specific exchange, Claude 3 Opus remixed Goatse—an extremely graphic late ’90s internet meme once described by WIRED as “the infamous photo of a man stretching his anus to the diameter of a grapefruit”—into a religion called the Goatse of Gnosis. Only with sufficient emphasis on alignment at this stage in AI development, before the output of errant chatbots is “composted” into future models, Ayrey proposes, can technologists be sure to stave off the prophesied Goatse Singularity.
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