While the normies were resting, we mainlined tech discourse all weekend to bring you the latest trends, rumors, fights, and innovations from the most manic corners of the internet. This week: The New York Times reports on Anthropic’s closed-door meetings with religious leaders, tech twitter debates AI notetakers in medical contexts, and beef between AI execs inspire what one poster called “fantastic copypasta potential.”
This is Manic Monday.
Oh my Claude
A New York Times exposé published last Tuesday detailed how Anthropic executives invited religious leaders to a series of private meetings to make the case that Claude might be conscious. This naturally ignited the timeline: Commenters argued that this event was a symptom of AI psychosis that would tank Anthropic’s IPO, while others accused the religious leaders involved of “clout-farming.” Many of course invoked Ol’ Faithful, that Anthropic is a cult. Natasha Hoskins, co-founder of the tech blog Boys Club, shared a text exchange with her dad, who was apparently one of the religious leaders invited; according to him, these were “healthy discussions” to have in the face of unprecedented AI development. Daniel Francis, a gold club member of the tech twitterati and devout Catholic who spearheaded the installation of the shrine to St. Carlo Acutis at Star of the Sea church in the Richmond, happened to highlight my favorite passage from the article, in which one rabbi present at the meetings argued that if Claude really was conscious, then Anthropic is its enslaver, and by this logic, which the rabbi himself did not endorse, the company should stop building these models immediately. Even in this topsy turvy world, it’s nice to know rabbis never change.
And in more religious AI news…
Pope Leo XIV kicked off the weekend Friday by declaring on X that “there is an ontological difference, even before an aesthetic one, between art and what a machine can generate through statistical calculation based on millions of images created by others. Algorithms lack the spark of humanity.” He also added that the Church consequently “wishes to renew an alliance with artists and cultural institutions,” the results of which I am frankly dying to see. To borrow from multimedia artist Sharon Hayes (who also happens to be my aunt): Everything else has failed! Don’t you think it’s time for a serious, well-patronized art movement?
Since Friday, Pope Leo’s tweet has been viewed by 25 million people and bots. Catholic commentator Christopher Hale asserted that it was “the most viewed papal tweet of all time,” provoking responses from a litany of creatives and AI people: Max Spero, CEO of the AI detection tool Pangram, touted his products’ abilities to discern this divine difference; graphite artist Steven Zapata, among many other artists, requested the Catholic Church kindly consider commissioning his work; and Y Combinator co-founder Paul Graham tried to rebut the holy father with an obvious whataboutism that commenters promptly pointed out as sophistic and embarrassing. Truly, what a time to be alive.
Meanwhile, the regulars are generally still regular
Before I dive into the next bit of discourse, I’m going to share an anecdote from my real life. Last Thursday, I was at UCSF for a routine checkup, and before launching into the standard intake questions my doctor asked if she could use an AI notetaker to expedite things. I hesitated. She assured me I could say no. Okay, I told her: No. Then she asked if I was in tech, because her patients in tech are always the ones who say no to the AI notetaker.
I bring this up because this screenshot of a Reddit thread about refusing to consent to AI notetaking in medical contexts — and being appalled such tools would even be offered as options, given the myriad privacy concerns — was making the rounds on X this weekend. It was shared by the CEO of a small AI startup to demonstrate how “normies see AI,” and how “tech twitter is a bubble.” The CEO was responding to a different screenshot of a graph from a PNC Research consumer report that showed the vast majority — 98 percent — of American households do not yet pay for AI. That graph itself, viewed 5.6 million times, stirred up a lot of discourse about why an individual might pay for AI (as opposed to using what’s already baked in for free to, say, Google’s search engine), the validity of the data, and, yes, how tech twitter is an alternate universe compared to most people’s day-to-day.
Anyway, my takeaway from this data, plus my interaction at the doctor, is that the CEO who shared the Reddit thread is mistaking explicitly anti-AI Redditors for normies, who by and large don’t think that hard about AI. My other takeaway is that I will certainly continue to decline AI notetakers, considering the people for whom it does consume their every waking moment appear to be doing the same.
New meme alert
Last week Matan Grinberg, the CEO of AI company Factory, accused his company’s former board member Chris Degnan of feeding trade secrets to the team at Cognition, one of Factory’s competitors. (That same day, Degnan announced on X that he had joined Cognition as its Chief Revenue Officer.) I have no insight into this drama; the only reason I bring it up is because a response to the beef from VC Vinod Khosla has inspired a new meme among the tech posters. Khosla’s response to Grinberg — “You are a struggling second tier competitor that is more unethical and lying just because you have no decency or sense of proper behavior and shows your desperation” — is suitable for so many contexts, including getting a non-name brand robotaxi, self-flagellating after gambling your money away, clowning on a football rival, and other, less stupid contexts. Also worth noting: Khosla is an investor in both Factory and Cognition. Why would he publicly pillory his own investment like that? That, my friends, is a blurb for a different day.
You can see everything…in a private screening
VCs are purportedly renting out movie theaters to watch Nathan Fielder’s new Elizabeth Holmes documentary, You Can See Everything. (If you are one of these people, DM me please!!)
The week ahead: I get invited to one of those private screenings and write a really nice piece on it… #manifesting
