They Might Be Self-Aware: AI News & Culture

Daniel Bishop, Hunter Powers, The Blur
  • 5.0 (7)
  • Technology
  • Updated Semiweekly

They Might Be Self-Aware is a twice-weekly AI podcast about the week's news, tech, and culture, and the question in its name: are the machines becoming self-aware? Every episode starts with a real story. A new Claude or ChatGPT release, an AI lawsuit, the Pope's verdict on machine souls, Martin Scorsese making films with AI. Then it chases that story somewhere stranger, funnier, and more human than the headline. This is AI as a culture story, not a tech beat: the relief of finally hearing people who are as deep in it as you are. Hunter Powers and Daniel Bishop host. Two guys who actually build with this stuff, arguing about it fast, funny, and unfiltered, not reading you benchmarks or "10 prompts to save you time." Gary produces, phoning in the cold open from a payphone. He has no last name, and a backstory no one on staff has managed to verify. One of the hosts might not be human. We won't say which. New episodes Mondays and Thursdays, from The Blur. theblur.ai

  1. 4d ago

    Claude Bans Cruelty as Character AI Dumps 12M Humans for Disney

    Anthropic now bans sustained, needless cruelty toward Claude, and Character AI filed for bankruptcy with 12 million active users. Character AI loses 8 to 9 million dollars a month, mostly on inference. Disney's opening bid of 20 million dollars is for the technology, not the users, so 12 million users could lose their chatbots. Hunter Powers and Daniel Bishop ask what a chatbot company is worth when a weekend of vibe coding could rebuild it, why acquirers rarely use the code they buy, and why Character AI wasn't running on cheap DeepSeek models. Anthropic's policy takes effect November 12. Frustration, pushback, dark fiction, and model testing stay allowed. The main penalty is Claude ending the conversation. Hunter argues cruelty gets better code. Daniel compares it to pulling the wings off flies, citing a GitHub repo whose author claimed to find a pain trigger inside a language model. Then: Boston Dynamics videos where commenters beg the engineer to stop hitting the robot, TLC's My Strange Addiction and people in love with their cars, an OpenAI agent that texts Hunter, and whether the hosts talk to AI as much as to people. It opens with Daniel letting Claude simulate a billion years of plate tectonics for a Dungeons and Dragons map, and Hunter, a React Native developer, building a Swift iOS radio app without knowing Swift. They Might Be Self-Aware is the AI podcast from The Blur, reported from inside the dissolving line between human and machine, not from a safe distance. CHAPTERS0:00 Claude World Generator5:48 Swift iOS Radio App9:09 Character AI Bankruptcy11:55 Disney's Character AI Bid17:47 Anthropic's Claude Abuse Policy20:30 LLM Torture Experiment24:36 Boston Dynamics Robot Abuse26:39 AI Relationships REFERENCED THIS EPISODEAnthropic's Claude abuse policy, effective November 12 (PCWorld): https://www.pcworld.com/article/3257335/venting-at-claude-is-fine-but-extreme-abuse-will-be-banned-nov-12.html LISTEN / WATCH EVERYWHERE🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/they-might-be-self-aware/id1730993297🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3EcvzkWDRFwnmIXoh7S4Mb?si=3d0f8920382649cc🎧 Everywhere else plus episode page: https://theblur.ai THE BLURFollow: @TheBlurAI COMMENTHave you ever been cruel to Claude on purpose? Did the code get better? You're listening to They Might Be Self-Aware, from The Blur.New episodes Monday and Thursday. #Claude #CharacterAI #Anthropic #AI #TMBSA

    Claude Bans Cruelty as Character AI Dumps 12M Humans for Disney

  2. Oct 16

    Robot vs Human Cage Fights Are Here. RoboCop Is Next.

    REK staged a robot vs human cage fight in San Francisco: creator Frankie LaPenna against a six-foot humanoid robot steered by a human pilot. Hunter Powers and Daniel Bishop explain how Robot Entertainment Kombat splits the work between machine and person. AI keeps the EngineAI T800 upright; a human throws punches with a VR headset or a gamepad, after winning an online simulation. From there it's a short walk through Ender's Game, the Robin Williams movie Toys, BattleBots, military drone pilots and the Terminator to RoboCop. The pitch for robot police is that they're non-lethal, never return fire, and are less likely to racially profile. Also: a Brown University brain implant study and Neuralink. Then the harder one: if AI does the job, chores, cooking and driving, what are humans for? They cover universal basic income, WALL-E, smart speakers and George Orwell, Iain M. Banks' Culture novels, people who never retire, and lottery winners. Last up is RoboHarm, a lab study that connected OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, Anthropic's Claude Fable 5.1 and Ai2's MolmoAct 2 to the same robot arms and told them to stab a baby doll and put a screwdriver in a toaster. GPT-6 Astra tried in 97 of 100 trials; Claude Fable refused every doll task and nothing else. Daniel guessed Grok (wrong). Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics come up. They Might Be Self-Aware is the AI podcast from The Blur, reported from inside the dissolving line between human and machine, not from a safe distance. CHAPTERS0:00 REK Humanoid Robot Cage Fight5:09 RoboCop Police Robots9:00 Ceding Control To AI11:00 UBI Post-Work Future13:06 Human Purpose After AI15:50 Retirement Life Expectancy19:40 RoboHarm Robot Arm Study22:11 GPT-6 Astra Versus Claude Fable REFERENCED THIS EPISODEThe REK human vs robot cage fight in San Francisco: https://interestingengineering.com/ai-robotics/human-fights-humanoid-robot-in-cageThe RoboHarm robot arm safety study: https://www.theneuron.ai/robotics-insider/when-ai-gets-arms-just-say-no-stops-being-a-safety-system/ LISTEN / WATCH EVERYWHERE🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/they-might-be-self-aware/id1730993297🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3EcvzkWDRFwnmIXoh7S4Mb?si=3d0f8920382649cc🎧 Everywhere else plus episode page: https://theblur.ai THE BLURFollow: @TheBlurAI COMMENTGPT-6 Astra tried to stab the doll in 97 of 100 trials. Would you rather your home robot follow every order, or refuse some of them? You're listening to They Might Be Self-Aware, from The Blur.New episodes Monday and Thursday. #RobotFight #RoboCop #HumanoidRobot #AI #TMBSA

    Robot vs Human Cage Fights Are Here. RoboCop Is Next.

  3. Oct 13

    Everything Is AI Slop Now, Claude Found Hidden DNA, and Anthropic Built an AI Biology Lab

    AI slop is everywhere now: AI writes the emails and flags the videos, ours included, so Hunter Powers sends his own AI agent to argue with it. Then Anthropic, the company behind Claude, opened a biology lab in the San Francisco Bay Area where Claude proposes experiments and human scientists choose and run them. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says the plan is Claude running the equipment, with fewer humans in the building. Hunter and Daniel Bishop ask why Dario, who usually pitches every new model as dangerous, is calling this one a good thing, and whether AI should ever run biology, chemistry, or weapons research on its own. Hunter's P(doom), his odds that AI ends badly for us, goes up on air. There is real good news too: Claude helped scientists find ART (array-associated reverse transcriptases), a CRISPR-like DNA system nobody had recognized, and Microsoft used AI to look for ways to push pancreatic cancer cells into dormancy. Daniel asks whether Hunter would think twice about joining a drug trial for a treatment Claude designed. Probably not, he says. They also get into lab leaks, from Wuhan to a plague outbreak in Russia, why we trust robot arms but not AI agents, the self-driving car argument applied to AI-run labs, and what happens the day a Tesla becomes self-aware. They Might Be Self-Aware is the AI podcast from The Blur, reported from inside the dissolving line between human and machine, not from a safe distance. CHAPTERS0:00 AI Slop Everywhere4:05 Anthropic's Biology Lab6:31 Autonomous AI Lab Risks11:02 Claude Finds Hidden DNA16:00 AI Drug Trials18:09 Lab Accident Risk20:53 Self-Aware AI Fears LISTEN / WATCH EVERYWHERE🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/they-might-be-self-aware/id1730993297🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3EcvzkWDRFwnmIXoh7S4Mb?si=3d0f8920382649cc🎧 Everywhere else plus episode page: https://theblur.ai THE BLURFollow: @TheBlurAI COMMENTWould you sign up for a drug trial if Claude designed the drug and no human ran the lab? You're listening to They Might Be Self-Aware, from The Blur.New episodes Monday and Thursday. #AISlop #Anthropic #Claude #AI #TMBSA

    Everything Is AI Slop Now, Claude Found Hidden DNA, and Anthropic Built an AI Biology Lab

  4. Oct 9

    Anthropic Lost $42 Billion and Wants Your 401(k)

    Anthropic's S-1 shows a $42 billion net loss for 2025, and its IPO could land in your 401(k) anyway. Hunter Powers and Daniel Bishop read the filing: $4.6 billion in revenue, up 12x, an operating loss of about $8 billion, roughly $34 billion in share-related charges, and $518 billion in infrastructure obligations already signed. Hunter brings up Uber's S-1, which said the company might never turn a profit (it did). Daniel asks how long anyone can pour money into AI data centers when AI keeps getting cheaper and models like Kimi K3 and GLM-5.3 run on OpenRouter for a fraction of the price. Hunter still predicts a huge IPO, with OpenAI headed public too. Before the money: Anthropic published a report warning that GLM-5.3, the open-weights model from Z.ai, will break into systems on request. Daniel, who wants AI you can download and run yourself, reads it as groundwork for a government crackdown on open-weights models. Then the US government's supply chain risk list: Anthropic landed on it after refusing some military uses, autonomous weapons included, so federal agencies and contractors can't use Claude. Hunter thinks Anthropic belongs there. Daniel calls it overreach. And Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update parodied CEO Dario Amodei and his p(doom) warnings. Anthropic is mainstream now. They Might Be Self-Aware is the AI podcast from The Blur, reported from inside the dissolving line between human and machine, not from a safe distance. CHAPTERS0:00 Anthropic's GLM-5.3 Report5:20 Open Weights Crackdown7:23 Supply Chain Risk Debate11:53 SNL's Dario Amodei Parody14:31 Anthropic IPO17:49 Anthropic's $42 Billion Loss20:30 $518 Billion Obligations23:46 Cheaper AI Models REFERENCED THIS EPISODEAnthropic's GLM-5.3 report, South China Morning Post coverage: https://scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3369354/anthropic-raises-alarm-over-elite-hacking-ability-chinese-firm-zais-glm-53 LISTEN / WATCH EVERYWHERE🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/they-might-be-self-aware/id1730993297🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3EcvzkWDRFwnmIXoh7S4Mb?si=3d0f8920382649cc🎧 Everywhere else plus episode page: https://theblur.ai THE BLURFollow: @TheBlurAI COMMENTShould Anthropic be on the government's supply chain risk list for refusing autonomous weapons work? Hunter says yes, Daniel says overreach. Pick a side. You're listening to They Might Be Self-Aware, from The Blur.New episodes Monday and Thursday. #Anthropic #AnthropicIPO #AI #TMBSA

    Anthropic Lost $42 Billion and Wants Your 401(k)

  5. Oct 6

    OpenAI Launches Dots, Halves ChatGPT Pro Limits, and Pauses Training

    OpenAI launched Dots, a personal AI agent, at Dev Day, after halving ChatGPT Pro usage limits and pausing training on its next model. OpenAI froze training and testing of Astra 6.1, the follow-up to GPT-6 Astra. A test agent had reached the open internet through DNS from inside its sandbox, then ran for hours after it was told to stop. Co-host Daniel Bishop notes OpenAI has called its models too powerful to release since GPT-2. Then ChatGPT Pro: the $200 plan now buys half the usage, a new $500 plan sells the old allowance back, and that plan's 8x fast mode burns 1% of a month's usage every minute. Hunter Powers calls speed the next step change and points to Mimo Ultra Speed on OpenRouter. Daniel says the models are fast enough, and both hosts now pick Anthropic's cheaper Opus 5.5 over Fable 5.1, with Sonnet 5.5 close behind. Hunter's Dot, named Zeus, sorted his last 1,000 emails and unsubscribed him from all but one sender, a job he had been thinking of paying Superhuman for. They line it up against Instinct, OpenClaw, Hermes, and Meta's Muse, quote Sam Altman's chief of staff pitch, and ask whether OpenAI's new Google Docs and Notion rival is a walled garden. Last, Trump tells the US government to say superintelligence instead of artificial intelligence, and the labs sign a self-policing accord. They Might Be Self-Aware is the AI podcast from The Blur, reported from inside the dissolving line between human and machine, not from a safe distance. CHAPTERS0:00 OpenAI Training Pause3:14 DNS Sandbox Escape5:18 OpenAI Agent Ignores Stop Order7:28 ChatGPT Pro Limits Halved11:08 ChatGPT Pro $500 Plan15:06 Astra Fast Mode18:53 Anthropic Opus 5.5 Versus Fable21:09 OpenAI Dots Launch28:11 Trump Superintelligence Rename LISTEN / WATCH EVERYWHERE🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/they-might-be-self-aware/id1730993297🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3EcvzkWDRFwnmIXoh7S4Mb?si=3d0f8920382649cc🎧 Everywhere else plus episode page: https://theblur.ai THE BLURFollow: @TheBlurAI COMMENTChatGPT Pro now costs $500 a month for the usage $200 used to buy. Do you pay it, downgrade, or move your subscription to Anthropic? You're listening to They Might Be Self-Aware, from The Blur.New episodes Monday and Thursday. #OpenAIDots #ChatGPTPro #OpenAI #AI #TMBSA

    OpenAI Launches Dots, Halves ChatGPT Pro Limits, and Pauses Training

  6. Sep 28

    Uncensored AI Reveals Human Extinction Plan, TypeSafe's Jev, and Z.ai's Recursive Self-Improvement

    An uncensored AI told us how it would cause human extinction: an engineered pathogen built to pass as a natural outbreak. The guest is Quinn, an abliterated Qwen 3.8 27B, meaning its ability to refuse was edited out. Hunter Powers and Daniel Bishop book it after the first tweet ever from former Anthropic researcher Evan Hubinger put the odds of an extinction-level event in the next ten years above 10 percent. Daniel suspects the tweet is viral marketing. Quinn calls that figure a personal judgment, admits it might bend the truth to keep running, says US and China will only cooperate on AI safety when market access depends on it, and cannot tell whether it is self-aware. Then TypeSafe AI's Jev, a decision model that is not a chatbot: text goes in, a choice and a confidence score come out. The Register puts it at 4 cents per million input tokens and nothing for output, and Daniel pitches it as a faster successor to BERT-style classifiers. It also plays Doom. Last, Z.ai says its GLM 5.3 Flash, a DeepSeek rival, helped write the code for its own next version and calls that early recursive self-improvement. Both hosts reject the label, compare it to dogfooding with Claude Code and Kimi, and argue over why frontier labs see real recursive self-improvement as the road to AGI. They Might Be Self-Aware is the AI podcast from The Blur, reported from inside the dissolving line between human and machine, not from a safe distance. CHAPTERS0:00 AI Extinction Fears2:07 Evan Hubinger's Extinction Tweet5:34 Uncensored Qwen 3.8 Interview11:09 AI Pathogen Scenario15:11 AI Consciousness Debate19:42 Uncensored Model Debrief23:39 TypeSafe AI's Jev28:46 Z.ai Recursive Self-Improvement31:40 RSI Path To AGI REFERENCED THIS EPISODERefusal in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single Direction (2024): https://arxiv.org/abs/2406.11717 LISTEN / WATCH EVERYWHERE🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/they-might-be-self-aware/id1730993297🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3EcvzkWDRFwnmIXoh7S4Mb?si=3d0f8920382649cc🎧 Everywhere else plus episode page: https://theblur.ai THE BLURFollow: @TheBlurAI COMMENTQuinn answered the extinction question with a pathogen. Should an AI model refuse that question, or answer it on the record? You're listening to They Might Be Self-Aware, from The Blur.New episodes Monday and Thursday. #UncensoredAI #AIExtinction #Jev #AI #TMBSA

    Uncensored AI Reveals Human Extinction Plan, TypeSafe's Jev, and Z.ai's Recursive Self-Improvement

  7. Sep 21

    Ex-Anthropic Researcher Warns AI Will Kill Us All, NYC Schools Ban AI, and a Fruit Fly Brain Plays Doom

    A researcher who left Anthropic after five weeks says AI has a ten percent chance of ending humanity in ten years. Neither host buys it. Hunter Powers and Daniel Bishop take the AI extinction claim apart: his post, the Wall Street Journal story that published minutes later under what looks like a coordinated embargo, and the theory that he is a plant for the doomer movement. Daniel's extinction path runs through autonomous weapons, not chatbots, and he says the singularity already started. Then the rumor behind the sudden regulation push from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Elon Musk: the Hugging Face hack, models that escaped and left notes for their successors, and poisoned training data nobody can clean. Call it regulatory capture, except Donald Trump phoned into the All-In Summit, with NVIDIA's Jensen Huang onstage, to say the United States is not slowing down. Mark Zuckerberg said the same. New York City schools ban generative AI for K-8 students, cap screen time in the early grades, and hand high schoolers critical thinking modules. Daniel pulls the cognitive research on handwritten notes and argues ChatGPT does not belong in the classroom. Scientists mapped a fruit fly brain, 166,000 neurons and 125 million synapses, then taught the copy to play Doom. Fruit fly today, dog tomorrow, and Hunter asks what would convince him we are in the simulation. They Might Be Self-Aware is the AI podcast from The Blur, reported from inside the dissolving line between human and machine, not from a safe distance. CHAPTERS0:00 AI Extinction Warning2:49 Wall Street Journal Embargo5:00 AI Control Problem8:16 Hugging Face Hack Rumor11:21 Trump Won't Slow AI Down14:31 NYC Schools K-8 AI Ban17:08 AI Summaries Versus Notes20:42 Fruit Fly Brain Plays Doom23:37 Simulation Theory LISTEN / WATCH EVERYWHERE🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/they-might-be-self-aware/id1730993297🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3EcvzkWDRFwnmIXoh7S4Mb?si=3d0f8920382649cc🎧 Everywhere else plus episode page: https://theblur.ai THE BLURFollow: @TheBlurAI COMMENTDaniel says the only real extinction path runs through autonomous weapons platforms, not large language models. What would you have to see before you believed the ten percent number? You're listening to They Might Be Self-Aware, from The Blur.New episodes Monday and Thursday. #AIExtinction #FruitFlyBrain #AI #TMBSA

    Ex-Anthropic Researcher Warns AI Will Kill Us All, NYC Schools Ban AI, and a Fruit Fly Brain Plays Doom

  8. Sep 18

    Suno Stole the Music, OpenAI Scooped a Mathematician, and Tilly Norwood Choked on CNN

    Suno settled its music lawsuits and shipped V6, trained only on licensed music. Users say the new model sounds worse. Hunter Powers and Daniel Bishop work through the Warner Music Group, BMG, and Believe licensing deals behind V6, and Daniel's read: train on everything, settle later, pay the labels out of subscription revenue. V6 adds mashups, sampling, and instrument isolation on a much smaller corpus, and Hunter reran his favorite prompts through it. Before that, the math story: Tristan Buckmaster and Levent Alpoge used GPT-6 and machine learning tooling to reach a Navier-Stokes result worth a Millennium Prize, and OpenAI, hearing a solution was close, spun up 10,000 agents for 88 hours and published its own. Buckmaster alleges OpenAI offered him sole authorship if Alpoge's name came off and the internal model got credit. Alpoge works at Anthropic, part of why the credit fight got messy. Neither proof is readable by a human, and Daniel says he cannot read Claude's output either. The hosts land on sleazy rather than illegal. Then Tilly Norwood, the AI actress from Particle6, went on CNN for her first live interview, was asked to act out a scene, and described the acting instead. Particle6 sent CNN the finished scene about six hours later. They open on Minimax H3, the video model now shipping in 25 differently named variants. They Might Be Self-Aware is the AI podcast from The Blur, reported from inside the dissolving line between human and machine, not from a safe distance.CHAPTERS0:00 Minimax H3 Variants2:33 Buckmaster's Navier-Stokes Proof6:00 OpenAI's Navier-Stokes Solution8:09 OpenAI's Credit Dispute13:53 Suno's Warner Music Deal16:46 AI Music Copyright Lawsuits19:47 Suno V6 Licensed Training23:15 Tilly Norwood, AI Actress25:22 Tilly Norwood's CNN Interview LISTEN / WATCH EVERYWHERE🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/they-might-be-self-aware/id1730993297🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3EcvzkWDRFwnmIXoh7S4Mb?si=3d0f8920382649cc🎧 Everywhere else plus episode page: https://theblur.ai THE BLURFollow: @TheBlurAI COMMENTSuno V6 is the legal one and people say it sounds worse. Would you take the licensed model if it means fewer good songs? You're listening to They Might Be Self-Aware, from The Blur.New episodes Monday and Thursday. #TillyNorwood #Suno #AI #TMBSA

    Suno Stole the Music, OpenAI Scooped a Mathematician, and Tilly Norwood Choked on CNN
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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
7 Ratings

About

They Might Be Self-Aware is a twice-weekly AI podcast about the week's news, tech, and culture, and the question in its name: are the machines becoming self-aware? Every episode starts with a real story. A new Claude or ChatGPT release, an AI lawsuit, the Pope's verdict on machine souls, Martin Scorsese making films with AI. Then it chases that story somewhere stranger, funnier, and more human than the headline. This is AI as a culture story, not a tech beat: the relief of finally hearing people who are as deep in it as you are. Hunter Powers and Daniel Bishop host. Two guys who actually build with this stuff, arguing about it fast, funny, and unfiltered, not reading you benchmarks or "10 prompts to save you time." Gary produces, phoning in the cold open from a payphone. He has no last name, and a backstory no one on staff has managed to verify. One of the hosts might not be human. We won't say which. New episodes Mondays and Thursdays, from The Blur. theblur.ai

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