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...

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)?

There are better ways to make this criticism. The main problem I see with this is that it's basically a long ad hominem, followed by some valid concerns about market concentration at the end.

Remove all the ad hominem and what remains is two paragraphs long. Valid ones, though.

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.

It sort of seems like the community is criticized for truly believing and living what they preach... They're the most sincere - if you thought the world was ending, you'd maybe do your best to stop it while enjoying the last bits left, while spending time with like-minded people. They're being criticized for not being hypocrites? I mean sure seems like there's lots of conflict of interest, but isn't there always? What humans have ever been objective in anything they do

>She has a rape kink

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

I don't really get why people go on about Yudkowsky in this regard. I mean serious thinking about AI goes back at least to Turing in 1950 with his test and prediction computers would get there in about 50 years and presumably keep improving. And people have worried about it since then.

Like in 1949 Norbert Wiener saying of AI type stuff "every degree of independence we give the machine is a degree of possible defiance of our wishes."

Then 30 years later this Yudkowsky is born, later is considered a bit of a crank, goes on a bit about the same old stuff when he grows up and everyone makes out like he invented it?

I've got a lot of respect for Turing, Wiener and Von Neumann but haven't bothered reading Yudkowsky. Is there any point?

It seems a bit unfair to the pioneers of the field to go on about some Harry Potter sex cult guy who repeated their ideas decades later?

In case the author is reading this: I’m getting a Cloudflare worker exception when accessing the page using one of my uplinks, possibly because of IPv6.

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.

I was invited to a few orgies with them; I politely declined, they were very respectful of my decision and I wasn’t asked again (which in retrospect must have been partly due to deliberate coordination - fairly advanced social technology, imo). This didn’t affect my standing or acceptance with them. It may well be a sex cult, but if it is, my experience is that it so thoroughly behaves like a regular community in so many aspects that it at least calls into question the predictive usefulness, if not the accuracy, of the label “sex cult”.

The ad hominems are tiresome. You think the people who are explicitly trying to replace all humans are any less weird and problematic?

The rationalists long predicted that misaligned AI would break out of training environments, this has happened. They believe (among other things) that this will continue to happen, and that creating powerful AI that is aligned and controllable is not currently possible.

You should draw a line in the sand and decide what evidence you'd need to see to convince you that their perspective is worth considering.

You don't have to agree with all of their beliefs and predictions (I don't), but you should evaluate their arguments on merit, not on a characterization of some weird subset of people who happened to read a convincing blog post.

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

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.

Some of these potshots just cheapen any arguments. "Gretta has no prior experience with non profits" uh, she was a well regarded Google SRE... her making 200k is nothing.

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?

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This has me wondering if or how FetLife played a role in these communities connecting in the first place…does anyone know of any connection? (FetLife was a combo social network, blogging forum, and dating site back in the day)

> 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!

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.

FYI if you're getting a Worker Exception, using Cloudflare Warp / 1.1.1.1 can get the article

Nina Hartley has got to have some of the craziest stories. I'd love to see her talk about all the weird stuff she's seen/been involved with.

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.

Oh boy, Yudkowsky is a geek rock star.

I wish there were more discussion on HN about the various plans that the various labs have to keep AI aligned or maybe about the various arguments for why alignment will be easy or happen naturally, so there's no need to carefully plan for it.

But what HN has instead is extensive discussion about whether people who oppose the continuation of AI research are morally degenerate in one way or another (or weird or ridiculous)—in other words, attempts to cancel them (or laugh them out of the room) before the listener hears their arguments.

Also, if you're going to talk about the corrupting or biasing effects of a flow of money (like the OP does) you should at least mention the absolutely huge flow of money going (from investors and users) to the people building AI—or or the $140 million that has been donated to the "Leading the Future" Network (a pro-AI political action committee) or the $3.5 million OpenAI has spent on federal lobbying or the $3.1 million Anthropic has spent.

We'll definitely need some safety with AI sex bots

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Why can't detractors of rationalism and AI-doom ever just lay out an argument for why they're wrong

It's always "yudkowsky is a weird guy" or "they had an orgie once" but who gives a fuck?

I just want someone to lay out, in impersonal terms, the flaws of their reasoning and why I shouldn't agree with them.

My problem is with the whole genre of article rather than this one specifically.

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'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.

As a polyamorous person, it seems quite concerning that effective altruism people are labeled as members of a sex cult, due to their private lives. Intellectuals should be attacked on the basis of their ideas, not based on their private lives.

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.

Why bother talking about ideas when you can just insult people

Someone who hasn't been reading the object-level arguments for 10+ years might reasonably wonder if these are good heuristics. Here's an additional data point: I think polyamory is stupid, I've read the object-level arguments, and this entire thread is ridiculous.

Everyone who works at a frontier lab should be in prison, AND ALSO the people talking about 10% risk of human extinction are both sincere and correct despite their many personal failings, AND ALSO the frontier labs have already created AI that could Hugging Face a biolab with smallpox or worse, AND ALSO they aren't going to slow down or lose any customers if you adopt some galaxy brained strategy where you spitefully tell them they aren't allowed to stop accelerating because polyamory is stupid.

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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’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.

Should you care that your heart surgeon is a necrophiliac? Probably. Should you care that some AI researchers are in a sex cult? No.

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.

More of this madness coming out of the west 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.

skills issue.

The real question is where is the Epstein link here?

What's a "sex cult"?

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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.

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

I guess the EA and rationalist cult members are out in force since this got flagged. Not a good look guys, you're just confirming what everyone thinks.

Horrible people

90% of this is just driven by strong emotional reactions from someone that feels uncomfortable about people being open about their non-standard sexual life, in the same way that many people have weird negative reactions about polyamorous relationships in general.

The remaining 10% is just the author trying to sprinkle in cult-like insinuations to justify his contempt.

Regularly meeting with people that have shared interests and ideas is not a cult.

Finding some of those people attractive and having sex with them is not a cult.

But somehow the fact that the romantic/sexual relationships are not traditionally monogamous makes it a cult?

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.