Sexy Apocalypse

Nicholas Grossman is definitely onto something...:

There have always been humans who thought: 1) The world will end soon 2) It will happen in a cool, exciting way 3) It’ll happen to me personally 4) I’ll be a martyred prophet, or a warlord, or otherwise special 5) People who don’t see this are lesser “Sexy apocalypse” is a great phrase for that

[image or embed]— Nicholas Grossman (@nicholasgrossman.bsky.social) September 18, 2026 at 6:17 AM

Grossman was commenting on this Techdirt piece by Mike Masnick and Dave Willner. The latter was the head of trust & safety at OpenAI which should make his comments about his former employer as or more newsworthy as Coxon's comments on Anthropic.

When we picture the end of the world, the first thing that springs to mind is typically the cinematic version of “things going wrong.” We picture the musical score rising to a crescendo as the climactic events take place. Our heroes are fighting to stop some big giant, unstoppable threat. Even if they are ultimately doomed, there is something noble and exhilarating in going down fighting. And if our heroes somehow survive failure and make it to the post-apocalypse, they usually still have great hair, even though civilization has collapsed.

Put another way, in the movies, the apocalypse is usually pretty sexy. ...A lot of attention is being paid at the moment to an entire culture that has grown up around the “AI Safety” world that is intently focused on stories of doom and the threatened end of humanity. That’s big, attention getting, and splashy. The tabloid version of this culture — the group houses, the polyamory, the recruitment dynamics that a lot of people are suddenly discovering — is even splashier still. Taken as a whole, this specific version of AI safety is getting a lot of oxygen right now. It’s easy to see why — as a kind of “sexy apocalypse” these narratives, while frightening, are an exciting fantasy, even if they would be an awful reality. But that heightened fantasy is not what AI safety is actually about. It’s not about protecting us from the unlikely sexy apocalypse. It’s about protecting us from the far more likely, and far more numerous, stupid apocalypses along the way. This mismatch between cinematic safety and actual safety happens all the time. During the Manhattan Project, Edward Teller got some attention by worrying that the Trinity Test might set the entirety of Earth’s atmosphere on fire. Very cinematic! Very concerning! But, as with most things, the reality was much more mundane. Actual experts looked at Teller’s concern, ran the boring calculations, and ruled it out as a threat long before the actual test. That is how safety often works: boring, process-heavy work… that kills off the really sexy scenario. Instead of global immolation, the real risks came from otherwise smart people doing dumb shit, such as the infamous Demon Core incident, where physicist Louis Slotin exposed himself, and a number of others, to a lethal dose of radiation by trying to use a simple screwdriver head to separate a plutonium core from a reflector… and slipping. Incredibly, this was the second time a mistake like this had happened, with the exact same plutonium core, and Enrico Fermi himself had warned Slotin he’d be dead within a year if he kept it up. Turns out he was right....The [Hugging Face] incident wasn’t Terminator-style “rogue AI” doing anything. All of the mistakes that led up to this were, as Eryk Salvaggio points out at the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, fundamentally human mistakes. Employees at OpenAI deliberately disabled the guardrails, they gave the tool an effectively impossible task while telling it not to stop until it had accomplished the task, and they (accidentally!) left a door open for the tool to reach the internet and fan out. These are all human mistakes. Stupid, disappointing, easily preventable. Like using a screwdriver to prop open a plutonium core. And if we know anything, we know that humans will keep making mistakes like this, and not just because we’re stupid. Slotin wasn’t stupid. The OpenAI researchers who turned off the guardrails weren’t stupid. They were smart people doing dumb things. These sorts of “banal disasters” are the failure mode that we can and should be focused on minimizing because, while they can be just as damaging as the grand and cinematic versions, they are (self-evidently) far more likely to happen, because they only require stupid decisions to accomplish. No brilliant breakthroughs or novel technologies are required — just people doing stupid things because they’re overconfident in their own abilities — or overconfident because the talking machine confidently told them to be.