Anthropic & friends caught paying religious NGO's 3.3M for propaganda (effort.news)

66 pointsby nullbio4 days ago29 comments

nullbio 3 days ago

Some more juice:

The Guardian, reporters, and quoted experts getting paid obscene amounts of money for doom articles. Daniel Kokotajlo is making a killing selling this narrative:

https://x.com/brianchau57/status/2095128785955987698/photo/1

Thomas Larsen is the one behind the recent Reuters article and website that "discovered" the OpenAI wiki posting incident. I say "discovered", because him and Daniel obviously have insiders who are sharing information with them, and then getting paid to leak this information.

Sabine Hossenfelder being offered payments for doomer videos:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lPdmYMHrWKg

potamic 3 days ago

Aren't Guardian's journalists full time employees? Why is their salary being paid by an outside entity?

graemep 3 days ago

Not the journalists. The "experts" they are interviewing.

Edit: I was wrong. The journalists are also part time and work elsewhere:

https://www.tarbellcenter.org/team/aisha-down

https://www.effort.news/tarbell

potamic 3 days ago

No, see the entire thread. They claim article author's salary is paid by some Coefficient Giving organisation.

graemep 3 days ago

I edited it before I saw this. Yes, and there is an article on the media influence funding too: https://www.effort.news/tarbell

talon8635 3 days ago

I love how traditional media dropped the ball so bad that now people seek wisdom from random places like effort.news, whatever the hell that is, or some rando on TikTok. And of course the newer versions are, well…

watwut 2 days ago

Most were simply bought by billionaires who then made them be how they like them. Guardian is actually an exception here (not being owned by a billionaire).

But like ... traditional media were intentionally destroyed and made this way by ... tech industry.

freakynit 4 days ago

Influence network graph with many more connections: https://ai-fli.stupidlabs.lol/

Edit: updating with more nodes and connections... the graph will not load for next 5 minutes..

Edit: done ... more nodes and connections now.

nullbio 4 days ago

Wow, this is a great tool.

jmathai 3 days ago

I recently posted that “Big Tech Wants To Br Your Bible Translator”.

Each industry has its own challenges with AI. The YouVersion CEO is vocal about his belief that GenAI isn’t suitable for many use cases. I can see why they’d want to control that narrative.

https://jaisenmathai.com/faith-and-ai/big-tech-wants-to-be-y...

pythonic_hell 3 days ago

The only moat Anthropic and OpenAI can build is through regulation. The only way they can do that apparently is by making people think the end times are here.

bamboozled 3 days ago

Did you get this from the latest Tim Dillon podcast?

If not it’s funny at least several people are seeing the same pattern emerge.

I have to say u wasn’t a fan on this guy before when he was a Trump shill but lately he’s had some accurate and funny takes.

watwut 2 days ago

I raise you the nerd reich thingy. It talks about apocalyptic and end times of believes running in those social circles.

krrrh 4 days ago

The headline is:

“AI Safety Donors Paid Religious NGOs $3.3M for Statements on AI”

The headline above states:

“Anthropic & friends…”

It’s at best a misleading change, though the article merits discussion.

nullbio 4 days ago

Did you read the article and the X thread? It is all tied to Anthropic. "Propaganda" is a more accurate description than "statements" when we're talking about paying bribes to religious NGO's for theological framing around AI and as a means for political connections and sway.

"The Future of Life Institute mobilized religious connections to support Anthropic and sway the Trump admin"

Series A Lead: Skype co-founder and Future of Life Institute co-founder/board member Jaan Tallinn personally led Anthropic's $124 million Series A funding round in May 2021 through his philanthropic/investment circles. [1] (https://siliconvalleyinvestclub.com/ar/investors/future-of-l...), [2] (https://dealroom.co/news/145208-anthropics-124m-series-a-cam...)

They're all in bed together.

colejohnson66 3 days ago

HN guidelines say to use the actual title and to not editorialize it.

nullbio 3 days ago

Ah, my bad. I forgot there was a rule against changing the titles - it has been a while since I have read the guidelines. I'll make sure to remember that in the future. If a mod has issue with it could you please update it for me. It's past the edit window, so I can't change it myself.

benlivengood 3 days ago

Hold on; GiveWell Labs/OpenPhil/Coefficient Giving is older (2011) than Anthropic, the AI safety folks are way older than OpenPhil (~90s, older sci-fi), and it stretches the imagination to claim that your product will kill everyone in order to sell more of it. That's conspiracy theory territory. Even cigarette companies pretended to be harmless.

I don't think it's a secret that the safety folks (including "doomers") are funding a lot of anti-AGI articles and researchers. But they're generally at odds with the big labs (Anthropic, OpenAI, Alphabet, Meta) about the basic concept. The Yudkowsky branch believe AGI/ASI is incredibly likely to take over and end life on Earth. The major labs think the worst that can happen is a few more publicly embarrassing hacks but that anything truly dangerous is a distant threat. ~most safety researchers fall somewhere in the middle.

Anthropic started as a mid-safety reaction to the way OpenAI was being operated but is by no means close to the "doomer" end of the spectrum.

jgalt212 3 days ago

It's gotten to the point where I expect anyone who makes rose-colored glasses claims about AI to be on the take. Trillions of dollars are stake here. What's a few million here and there to help force the outcome you need?

tyre 3 days ago

I remember at one of the Black Lives Matter protests seeing someone with a sign like “Tax Cuts for Paid Protesters!”

Let me know if you ever meet someone whose source of wealth was “HackerNews AI Astroturfer”.

nullbio 3 days ago

There is funding for pro-AI as well, but the overwhelming majority of it is being funnelled into the doomer movement. Anthropic in particular is funding the opposite of pro-AI narratives and to promote the idea that AI is going to kill everyone unless it's heavily regulated. They've been trying for regulatory capture since the very beginning.

The Future of Life has funded 30 projects to develop AI safety content since launching a digital media accelerator last year. The application form on the nonprofit's website says it plans to spend $100,000 a month.

Anthropic's perspective is that if the open-weight models and open-source ecosystem is allowed to flourish, they'll lose trillions of dollars. They're desperate to do anything they can to prevent it from happening.

nullbio 4 days ago

More info on X:

https://x.com/beffjezos/status/2096011033144095176

https://x.com/brianchau57/status/2096010406330556731

Synthetic7346 3 days ago

Reminds me of the Bene Gesserit from Dune