AI Safety Is Mostly a Sex Cult

Why bother talking about ideas when you can just insult people

I too wrote about this, although _much_ longer, if you want a bit of a deeper dive on the subject https://www.iankduncan.com/personal/2026-09-16-sex-ai-and-th...

>She has a rape kink

That's enough internet for today, back to playing video games

Also covered by nypost: https://nypost.com/2026/09/16/business/ai-doomsayers-wild-li...

I’d rather be in a “sex cult”, whatever that entails, than this ridiculous culture that’s somehow still doing moral panics over sex. Maybe it’s just deeply human, or maybe it really is stabilizing society to relegate sex to something dirty and private, but I have a feeling it’s just a dumb conflation that’s so easy to exploit it’s never allowed to go away. It’s like the “think of the children” thought-stopper and we’d do well to get past it.

Naturally, any culture has misfits, radicals and free-thinkers, and so naturally a sex-negative culture will produce at least some focus on sex in its counter-cultures. Doesn’t seem very interesting.

Sometimes when I find someone to look up to and admire, I later find out there is potentially some dark reality to them. I then lament not being able to find any good role models in the world. If they have missused donor money, then that is terrible. If they are pushing towards goals that seems contrary to their stated mission, that is difficult to judge. I did always find it odd, 10 years after reading Yudkowsky's passionate writings, that he doesn't seem to have really gone and done anything about it. If it was all just a creative writing exercise to him... Then that would be rather humiliating to me, having taken it very seriously.

As a side note. If I had a choice to oppose a booming ai comoany, or become the billionaire founder of it, I would still choose to become the founder and then use my resource to do something about. It certainly feels hypocritical, but if you want to stop a boulder rolling down hill, what can you do besides run ahead of it and try stop it?

I've tried to read this, but somehow the article doesn't really come to a point. Is there any point besides Yud not being perfect, and having connections to people who openly talk about their sex life (and that it's somewhat non-standard)?

I'm not sure how being polyamorous, having kinks and not hiding them makes someone part of a cult, even if I generally don't agree with Yud's entire thesis.

Any actually-reasonable person who was around for the founding craze of this era, ie., New Atheism, quickly realised that there was a deep pathology at the heart of many of its zealots, perhaps summed up by a desired to "recreate religion in their own image". I've walked into many a room of people screaming that teaching children falsehoods is literally child abuse. Any one who knows much of Richard Dawkins, Krauss, et al.'s background with women shouldnt be surprised either.

It's californication into the "rationalist" community as it currently stands is no surprise. Every person I've met deep in this community either seemed to me a narcissist (if male) or, politely and mildly, coquettish (if female). With several relationships I've observed a clear union of the two. I hadn't yet put this so clearly together with the "AI Saftey" crowd, despite being directly adjacent to it all for quite awhile and seeing the cross-proliferation.

My own analysis had concerned their philosophical naivety, general lack of actual computer science knowledge and generic shallowness of understanding of any domain outside their own research and a kind of "science-fiction" version of philosophy and rationalism. I hadn't connected this yet to their strange personalities, but the apoclypticism fits and neatly bridges these together.

So what became of the New Atheist project to create a "secular religion" -- an apocalyptic sex cult furnished by a blend of sci-fi, pop-philosophy, and cute parables from polymath medical professionals. All in all then, it seems they succeeded.

More of this madness coming out of the east coast of America, in particular California.

The Manson family, Heaven's Gate, NXIVM, Rationalists, Zizians... what next?

All turn out to be rotten to the core with their need to reshape and craft their own paradigm, which then gets warped by egos, individualism and power.

Hate to think what other madness is brewing.

There's a great movie or Streaming series on this post somewhere.

Sometimes people can be too smart for their own good. Like a frontier model in an eternal hallucination loop, you can create entire seemingly consistent realities in your head and end up bringing others into it.

For some reason the bit that stuck out to me in a wild ride of an article was the guy who believed a super-intelligence was a threat to humans but distanced himself from veganism as if that was crazy part of the AI-doom sex cult that he disagreed with.

a) because veganism seems as exotic to me as someone doing CrossFit

b) the very obvious parallels of a more intelligent creature torturing and killing large numbers of other creatures for relatively little benefit.

Well, this is old news. I'm still baffled by the fact that people take output of public personas as isolated facts. Take Nietzsche. Sure, great philosophical input. But try reading the sections about women. Same for Schopenhauer. Why? Because they were both incels and had big mother wounds that have never been addressed. So they spew their shit and people take it at face value even tho it stems from hurt. So why would I take any of this seriously if it's very obviously stupid and removed from reality? (Doesn't mean their whole works are)

People chasing the absolute rational are in my experience numbing their emotional part because theres something they can't look at. Or people that chase success above all are driven by their "unresolved packages" as well. I'm not saying that any of this is wrong per se, it's not black and white. But it's the context for what people do, say, and think. They are human after all. We need to consider context and not only the idea itself.

> Somewhere, some rationalist-brained person is reading this and saying I'm a "low decoupler", and that whether they run a sex cult has nothing to do with whether they're correct.

Glad he's at least admitting it as a possibility.

Also: you know, you don't need to rely on lossy proxies like how much or how little sex do the arguments' proponents have. You can just read the arguments!

The word "cult" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. It can mean anything from religion, to weird religion I don't like, to the organizations that try to cut you off from contact with your family and other people outside the organization. Only the last type are the bad ones, from what I can see.

If the man known for urging caution with respect to AI founded a sex cult, then I don't think i want to know what kind of stuff the accelerationist faction are into.

I tried to read Map and Territory, it just isn't that good if expecting Nietzsche or Heidegger.

A sex cult though is obviously a salacious framing.

It is just sad if even San Francisco culture is trending toward a sexual morality and sexual closed mindedness on par with bible thumpers.

I mean, this is a rather fun article to read but I'm not entirely sure about the thesis.

> AI Safety Is Mostly A Sex Cult.

> I don't think these people should make policy. (1/?)

One of the learnings from things like the whole Epstein saga has been there are a lot of sex cults in the policy making world and, yes, the people making policy generally shouldn't be. But I'm not sure this article actually comes up with a good explanation of why these particular people shouldn't be making policy. People having active sex lives isn't a disqualifying trait. Being in a cult doesn't disqualify people from being in politics. It is routine and expected that fields will have a lot of similar people in them (as I recall the overlap between security researchers and the furry community is unusual too, and that is hardly more important than justifying a passing comment).

It is more routine than the article writer seems to think for all the people in a small field to know each other and get on really well.

We'll definitely need some safety with AI sex bots

Horrible people

skills issue.

If you think your issue is important, and that people should follow your lead, maybe leave the sex cult first.

If anyone is serious about this topic they will find a new spokesperson immediately.

I’m literally speechless. I just can’t.

Good to see some raising the issue of the sex cult that Effective Altruism is:

I'd like to hear what feminists have to say about that picture in TFA of that woman and six men watching her. Just as I'd like to hear what feminists have to say about Amodei's wife who used to run a porn site.

And while a sex-cult abusing women is one thing. Theft is another. More emphasis should be put though on the lying scums in their ranks, like the polyamorous SBF and Caroline Ellison or their guru and its $15m ill-acquired mansion in the UK (which hasn't been clawed back yet but could).

And speaking of lying scums stealing money, we know about several making constant announcements were they lie, lie and then lie some more to ensure a never-ending stream of money and insane valuation of their proprietary, closed, not altruistic at all companies.

A despicable movement and I, for one, I'm very happy that there are companies out there releasing open-weights models so that the thieving-and-sex-cult at least get some competition.

He does not understand the issue. Not presenting any backing for his ideas, just emotions. The idea has been misused by the bros immensely, that does not help to grasp it either. But AI extermination of humans is a well known problem we have no solution for. Luckily AGI is not so close.