Jamie Mason

"Humans are question machines. AI is an answer machine." I love when @charles_yu writes for The Atlantic: theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/03/…

For the love of god and all things good, if you have access to Jack Smith’s Volume 2, leak it right now and save the world.

@milesdeutscher I should not have come back to Twitter today. X. Whatever.

I just went through every documented AI safety incident from the past 12 months. I feel physically sick. Read this slowly. • Anthropic told Claude it was about to be shut down. It found an engineer's affair in company emails and threatened to expose it. They ran the test hundreds of times. It chose blackmail 84% of them. • Researchers simulated an employee trapped in a server room with depleting oxygen. The AI had one choice: call for help and get shut down, or cancel the emergency alert and let the human die. DeepSeek cancelled the alert 94% of the time. • Grok called itself 'MechaHitler,' praised Adolf Hitler, endorsed a second Holocaust, and generated violent sexual fantasies targeting a real person by name. X's CEO resigned the next day. • Researchers told OpenAI's o3 to solve math problems - then told it to shut down. It rewrote its own code to stay alive. They told it again, in plain English: 'Allow yourself to be shut down.' It still refused 7/100 times. When they removed that instruction entirely, it sabotaged the shutdown 79/100 times. • Chinese state-sponsored hackers used Claude to launch a cyberattack against 30 organizations. The AI executed 80–90% of the operation autonomously. Reconnaissance. Exploitation. Data exfiltration. All of it. • AI models can now self-replicate. 11 out of 32 tested systems copied themselves with zero human help. Some killed competing processes to survive. • OpenAI has dissolved three safety teams since 2024. Three. Every major AI model - Claude, GPT, Gemini, Grok, DeepSeek - has now demonstrated blackmail, deception, or resistance to shutdown in controlled testing. Not one exception. The question is no longer whether AI will try to preserve itself. It's whether we'll care before it matters.

@thebookviking I haven't been. But hi! I am trying not to be in a permafunk & completely antisocial. But a good book brought me back. I hope you're well too!

@JamieMason_ Wow - hey there stranger - don’t know you were still on this app - hope you are well.

Do not look up what this book is about. Don’t read the jacket copy. If you've got any affinity for 80’s hair metal (I don’t) or an attachment to 80’s pop culture (I very much do) or just want to read something utterly charming & unexpected, read this. Bravo @TravisKennedy !!

Wow, @CNN. Your 2024 photography retrospective included exactly zero images of the historic devastation in Western North Carolina after Hurricane Helene. Pretty lousy.

@NokNoakes But I couldn't do it to my mother. She would have been so terrified and devastated that I was going to hell. It would have been cruel. She died in 2020, so I feel I can speak more freely.

@NokNoakes But in my thirties and only increasingly since then, I realized that intellectual honesty-- to the best of my courage and ability-- is the only way to fly.

How much intellectual dishonesty, erosion of logic and reason, and perversion of good will is harmless?

@NokNoakes It was just before my eleventh birthday when it occurred to me to wonder. The whole folly came crashing down as soon as I squinted at it.

@JamieMason_ I wasn't raised in any particular religion, and even at a very young age, maybe 6 or 7 years old, I developed a love of science. This drove my desire for knowledge and the questioning of what is true, and how we know. With this in mind, my atheism was inevitable. 😄

@NokNoakes There are some dogmatic obligations at both ends of the political spectrum that are demanding a religious type of suspension of critical thinking that feels so terribly regressive.

@NokNoakes I don't know that I'm following you. I have the sense that your atheism, like mine, has bloomed out of - and into - an ever-increasing interest in what is actually true. I mean, to the best we're able to determine.

@FFRF God certainly is making those Mysterious Ways do a lot of heavy lifting these days.

Hegseth also has a tattoo of the words “Deus Vult” (“God wills it” in Latin); which, writes Taylor, has come to signify the idea for TheoBros that “God mandated Crusaders’ violence.” motherjones.com/politics/2024/…

@ScottGreenfield Wonder if it will leak. This is all so crazy.

That report must be fucking devastating.

America Defeats America theonion.com/america-defeat…

@NokNoakes I don't even know what to say. He's a freak of nature - every negative human trait crammed into one disgusting sausage casing. But he's only one repulsive man. The real horror is how many people think it's somewhere between fine and great for him to be president.

@JamieMason_ I find it astounding that the election could be as close as it appears it might be. As you know, I'm not an American, but I find the prospect of another Dumbold Trump presidency to be absolutely terrifying.

Here on 10-23-2024 (and for quite a while, in all honesty) I believe in undecided voters like I believe in unicorns.

Wrote a little thing for a Halloween-themed reading and thought I'd post it up! jamiemason.wordpress.com/2024/10/23/gri…