Plz Don’t Kill Us: Inside AI safety’s influencer bootcamp

Can TikTokers make existential risk mainstream?

Oliver Kemp for Transformer

“Would you like a bite of cake? It’s for my time lapse.”

A petite woman with metallic silver face paint points to the remains of a days-old wedding cake. A tripod-mounted iPhone stands at the end of the picnic table. Another woman is about to start a 24-hour livestream in the building behind us. Around the firepit, several others squint at laptops, fighting the sun’s glare.

I politely decline the cake and make myself a press badge out of construction paper and glitter glue. Usually at Lighthaven, a converted Berkeley hotel that serves as the default conference center and clubhouse for the rationalist community, women are few and far between. Cool women are even rarer. Today, I’m quite literally surrounded by women who’d fit in with Kylie Jenner. A guy with a septum piercing and green hair walks on his hands across the fake lawn.

At the start of July, nearly 60 content creators — some seasoned, many first-timers — packed their bags and moved to Berkeley for Plz Don’t Kill Us, or PDKU, a month-long bootcamp meant to inject fun and sex appeal to AI safety comms. It’s the brainchild of Aella, Substacker/amateur data scientist/sex worker/orgy-nizer, and Ronny Fernandez, who pitched “anthropomorphic raccoon of Lighthaven” as a fitting job title.

The rules of PDKU are simple. Fellows live at Lighthaven rent-free for the month of July, and have to post one short-form video every day. The video must be at least 15 seconds long, and it can be about anything that isn’t “neglectfully misinformed” or needlessly cruel. Anyone who fails to post something by 11:59 pm gets kicked out of the house.

It might sound like the setup for a reality show (several fellows joked that it ought to be), but it’s partially funded by the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI), one of the most established organizations in the world of AI existential risk. Throughout the month, fellows were visited by a rotating cast of AI safety experts and internet celebrities including video essayist CJ the X, rationalist luminary and MIRI founder Eliezer Yudkowsky, as well as a video call from synth-pop artist (and Elon Musk’s ex) Grimes.

The PDKU house, based at Lighthaven

PDKU is a bet that if AI safety nerds, zoomer edgelords and fashion girlies hang out for a month-long sleepover, united by shared challenges and friendly competition, they’ll rub off on each other. It’s an experiment in throwing proverbial spaghetti (TikToks) at the wall (the general public) to see what sticks. Maybe, just maybe, a star will be born, and fifteen seconds of fame will shape the public’s AI discourse more than fifteen years of blogging on LessWrong, the prominent forum for reason- and first-principles-obsessed rationalists, ever could.

The theory of change at PDKU is multi-tiered and a bit nebulous. On the surface, it’s about science communication. “Last year, there were a couple of instances where I watched nerds try to communicate, and oh my god, they don’t know how to talk or get the concepts across,” Aella told SF Standard back in April.

PDKU isn’t the first attempt by the AI safety-minded to inform regular people, of course. There’s BlueDot Impact, which runs beginner-friendly courses that help people get into the field. There’s the Tarbell Fellowship, run by Transformer’s publisher, which trains and funds journalists to work at major newsrooms. There’s even the Frame Fellowship, another AI safety content creator bootcamp in the Bay Area. But compare Frame’s website to PDKU’s, and the vibe difference will smack you in the face. The former features polished white-on-black sans serif text, reminiscent of an OpenAI product announcement. The latter has animated rainbow Comic Sans against a backdrop of floating rainbow sparkles.

This aesthetic contrast is by design. CJ the X, a PDKU mentor who’s advised MIRI on its comms strategy, thinks that AI safety advocates are too close to Silicon Valley for comfort. “The same guys that are running this camp, that are like, ‘AI might kill everybody,’ are the same people that use AI more than anybody I know,” they told me. “They’re obsessed with it. They love it.”

The PDKU site

This breeds distrust and resentment of both the AI industry and those who think the industry is destroying humanity. “People look at Mark Zuckerberg and they’re like, I don’t believe anything this guy says, he talks like a robot,” said Wyn, a PDKU fellow. “A lot of the AI safety people are also like that.”

Wyn is not like that. He’s a long-haired theater kid with video editing experience and a “rationalist-adjacent” brother who exposed him to AI safety canon. “People are pretty hungry to hear about what the hell is gonna happen with AI,” he told me. “But all the people who actually know what’s going on with AI are not, you know, goofy and engaging. So this is sort of filling a gap there.”

“People told me when I got there that [the organizers] said Plz Don’t Kill Us happened because of a rant I gave at a MIRI retreat, where I said ‘everyone hates you guys,’” CJ told me. (They added that Fernandez overheard this once and clarified, “it’s about 40% true.”)

PDKU would make more sense if it was just about getting goofy, engaging outsiders to communicate about AI safety better than AI safety people can. But, counterintuitively, the organizers tried very, very hard to convince fellows that they didn’t have to post about AI at all. “They really feel like, ‘Oh my god, this AI safety program wants me to make AI safety content.’ And we’re like, no, no, do silly things!” said keltan, a PDKU organizer and MIRI employee (who prefers his name is written in lowercase). To make authentic content that doesn’t stink of AI safety, the organizers figured, creators need space to be themselves.

“It’s really hard to run a fellowship that’s not an indoctrination camp,” Fernandez said. “If you don’t try really hard to not make an indoctrination camp, you will on accident.” PDKU, he argued, is trying its best to prevent fellows from feeling pressured into posturing as doomers to impress their doomer-y mentors. Because a deeper layer of the program’s mission, organizers told me, is to seed a cohort of creators — ideally, some of whom gain traction — who can build trusted relationships with their own niche audiences.

“What you should really do, especially if you want to be influential in AI safety, is to focus on the things that make you passionately human,” said Tyler Alterman, a fellow who spent the 2010s as a professional effective altruist (more recently, he co-founded Fractal University, an “improvised college” in New York City). I asked him, hypothetically, what might happen if someone like Ariana Grande were to become a PDKU fellow: someone with 363m Instagram followers and absolutely zero preexisting connection to Silicon Valley or AI safety. “It’d be jarring, it would alienate a bunch of her fans … She’d be taking away the thing that we’re fighting for,” he said. Alterman thinks that thing worth fighting for is something like human excellence and creative expression. But, he added, a lot of AI safety-focused effective altruists alienate people “by paving over their subjectivity with a cause. Just being a cause robot, a cause zombie … Which I did to myself.”

---

AI’s warning shot has arrived

---

The program’s most galaxy-brained goal, though, is to create a celebrity network that can be called upon in future times of need. As anyone who’s tried to organize an event knows all too well, cool people are more likely to go where cool people already are. “If you were like, hey, I can give you a warm intro to Ariana Grande, do you want to hang out with me and Ariana Grande at a bar? I’d be like, absolutely,” Fernandez said. “It’s valuable to us if there’s more AI safety content out there, but it’s also valuable to us if we have connections with large creators who we helped emerge into the world,” keltan said. “If we ever need to call on them, then we can.”

I came back to Lighthaven on a Saturday evening, a couple weeks after my first PDKU visit. A fellow recognized me and asked whether I was there for the “torture potluck.” I had no idea what he was talking about.

It was exactly what it sounds like: an all-you-can-tolerate buffet of unpleasant experiences, for the sake of Fucking Around and Finding Out. I watched people get mystery Sharpie drawings on their face and clothespins clipped to their ears. I tried a chocolate truffle laced with too much cayenne pepper, a hard-pressed pill of pure sour powder, and an Oreo after coating my mouth with a chemical that prevented me from tasting sweetness (the worst experience by far). Someone performed polka covers of nu-metal songs on the acoustic guitar. With my informed consent, two different people zapped me with violet wands.

Just before midnight, a small crowd gathered around someone laid down on an AstroTurf-lined wheelchair ramp. He was the first of shockingly many in line to get waterboarded — one of the most in-demand items on the torture menu. In fact, two people (neither of whom were fellows) brought “waterboarding” as their offering, and a third stepped in to help lead the experience safely. Everyone cheered and no one was hurt. Once they ran out of safe distilled water, disappointed would-be waterboardees had to be turned away. Fernandez said that organizers “were not aware of any waterboarding and only found out about it afterwards.”

Video taken by fellow Becca Lair

At first glance, it’s nearly impossible to identify the common denominator connecting the PDKU fellows, beyond the fact that they seem to love spending time with each other. “Every night’s a sleepover,” Wyn said, “No one wants to go to bed because we’re in this amazing place surrounded by amazing people.” Camden, a fellow who introduced himself while strumming an unplugged electric guitar, added, “a lot of people here would just not be interacting in any other scenario.”

I met a 19-year-old law student from Chile, who’s accumulated nearly 100k followers across Instagram and TikTok over the past three years by posting meticulously-researched Spanish-language science videos. There’s an ex-journalist, a hilarious small-town shitposter, an opera singer from Philly, and a techno-optimist who films herself embodying Claude Code “discombobulating” and “flummoxing” and such. Among them are a handful of rationalists and EA-adjacent types who hate short-form video, but care enough about x-risk to make content anyway. They’d have no reason to hang out in the wild, but somehow, here, they do.

The PDKU application was mildly off-putting by design. After a string of expected questions such as “What’s your take on AI?” and “What kind of content would you want to make?”, the form asked, “If you had to have sex with a cow would you rather it be dead or alive? Why?” All Comic Sans, with animated rainbow dots floating alongside the form field.

The purpose of the cow-fucking question, keltan said, is to give people the chance to “filter themselves out in the application process, so that they don’t show up and feel incredibly shocked about who is here.” Fernandez had a slightly different explanation. “We added it in to make it pretty clear that we don’t have a PR department or an HR department,” he said. “A lot of people who are concerned about x-risk and have different tastes and dispositions from Aella and were like, for the love of god, you have to remove that question.”

Tonchi Matta, fellow at PDKU

But the organizers refused to quell their edgelord tendencies, in part to ensure that, at least to some degree, their cohort of fellows shared them. “Even the icebreakers, like everything, they want you to know that they’re part of the weird community,” one fellow told me. “‘Stand over here if you’re super sexually active, and over here if not,’ or like, ‘rate yourself based off of like, the last time you masturbated.’”

The unifying thread, despite the fellows’ ideological diversity, is something like “openness.” Everyone at PDKU was willing to drop everything, move to Berkeley for a month, live in close quarters with strangers, and be perceived doing silly things on the internet. Admissions decisions were made almost entirely by Aella and Fernandez, and nearly every fellow I spoke to cited Aella as the reason they applied, so it’s possible that the truest common denominator is being someone the organizers think is cool, and vice versa.

Fernandez brought up his concerns about this before I did. “If the fellows think that I am cool, or they think that Aella is cool,” he said, “there’s always going to be some incentive to agree with people around you who are running a thing.” He says PDKU has a conduct policy, authored by him, that discourages relationships across power differentials. When I asked him how that gets enforced, in the absence of an HR department, he mentioned an unnamed community health lead. Fernandez is publicly dating a fellow: in a followup he said the relationship pre-existed the program, and that PDKU’s conduct policy, which he declined to share, only required disclosure of pre-existing relationships (though it forbids new romantic relationships with fellows during the program).

Every fellow I asked — over a dozen — described PDKU as an unusually great time. A couple mentioned that they entered expecting to dislike or be weirded out by their cohort, and left pleasantly surprised. I did too.

Before PDKU, fellow Avalon Warren, a cartoonishly adorable woman with over 1.3m followers across Instagram and TikTok, mostly posted about hair, makeup, and fashion. Last week, she posted about the OpenAI/Hugging Face breach.

When I asked the organizers what “success” would look like for PDKU, it sounded something like that: a fashion cutie pie starting to make AI safety content for her built-in audience, motivated by an authentic change of heart rather than external requirements. “My hope is that, in the end, our views per dollar are better than if we were just to have paid for a bunch of advertising,” keltan said.

Avisha NessAiver, a blue-goateed science communicator who entered his fellowship with enough chops to pass as a mentor himself, recently had a TikTok debunking data center water use misinformation go viral. This video, which he followed up with another adding extra nuance, got more than 6m views and over 800,000 likes. Andy Masley’s influential Substack novella debunking the AI water issue, for reference, got 452 likes.

Other fellows went viral for totally non-AI-related reasons. The most viewed video on the PDKU feed, captioned “the perfect bestie,” features a young woman running towards her best friend, who’s there to embrace her unconditionally… except when the running woman says she texted her ex-boyfriend. One runner-up is an unhinged TikTok of a fellow attempting to make salt out of his tears.

PDKU fellow broomhead sticking an onion on his eye

The majority of fellows didn’t go viral at all, as is to be expected from a program that seemed to prioritize quantity over quality and chaos over coherence (and given the vagaries of the TikTok algorithm). One fellow told me that many of their peers intend to stay in the Bay Area beyond this summer, and some are talking about starting content creator group houses of their own. Now that the program has wrapped, keltan believes that PDKU’s main contribution has been “finding highly valuable people who have gone unnoticed up until now” and “getting them working on the most important problem.” While the organizers have yet to run a full postmortem on their month-long experiment, they’ve already added an “apply for next time” button to their website.

Amid the science communication, shitposting, and heartwarming summer camp energy, there’s a giant elephant in the room. “It’s another multi-million-dollar thing happening on a compound in California,” CJ said. “Does everyone think you’re just an annoying cunty psyop?”

In April, the Washington Post opened its story about the Frame Fellowship — arguably the closest thing to PDKU to exist so far — with a sly mention of Lighthaven’s “AstroTurf lawn.” When PDKU applications first opened, Marc Andreessen quote tweeted the link, adding: “The inner party of AI doomerism is a Berkeley lifestyle grift fueled by unaccountable dark money.” This, just a couple weeks after a16z’s 8-week content creation bootcamp, the New Media Fellowship, wrapped in San Francisco.

When I asked PDKU fellows and organizers how they’d respond to critics arguing that they’re artificially manufacturing a seemingly-grassroots movement, most shrugged. “That does fit the technical definition. Like, sure,” Camden said.

Take Geese, the indie band that was labeled a “psyop” after getting weirdly famous in late 2025. Sure, a digital marketing company worked some magic to help them go viral. But before the means of content creation were democratized, anyone who “made it” was, by definition, an industry plant. “You needed resources in order to create art,” Wyn said. “Artists do well because people connect with them, and that’s not gonna change whether they’re resourced beforehand or not.”

The astroturfing of it all is a red herring, though. PDKU’s biggest weakness isn’t sketchy puppeteering by politically-motivated dark money groups. In fact, the program actively selected an ideologically diverse group of fellows to avoid having a potentially polarizing political message at all. Its rationalist co-founders are libertarian capitalists who are generally against telling the government what to do unless it involves regulating AI development. This is political, but they don’t make political arguments — there’s no true enemy to point to. “They’re so obscenely permissive of everything, right up until the point where all humanity dies in a science fiction catastrophe,” said CJ.

Fellows pictured left to right: Wyn, Brenda and Becca Lair

Unfortunately, without a moral argument — something like billionaires are evil for the left, or AI weakens traditional family values for the right — CJ suspects a program like PDKU can only ever reach people who already agree with its founders.

PDKU’s organizers take pride in creating a safe container for fellows to experiment freely, and experiment they did. Yet, despite relinquishing control of nearly everything, the “AI will kill us” narrative reproduced itself anyway. Fernandez told me that he’d encourage anyone to make videos against taking x-risk seriously, if it felt right. But of the hundreds of PDKU videos I watched last month, I never saw one. This narrative convergence was palpable at July’s Stop the AI Race protest in San Francisco, where I spotted many PDKU-made posters. “EVEN THE CEOs WILL DIE,” one said. “WE WANT OUR GLORIOUS TRANSHUMANIST FUTURE BACK,” said another.

But most people’s anger toward AI isn’t about human extinction. Becca, the opera singer, told me that she senses an “automatic ick” when AI comes up with her AI-disinterested friends. “And like, having attended the AI race protest, I felt the ick so much,” she said. “This makes us very dunkable.”

What most people — likely including Becca’s friends — actually resent is Silicon Valley overreaching into everyone’s lives without consent. Because the extended rationalist universe is largely viewed as part of Silicon Valley, tapping into this resentment might mean letting people who don’t care about x-risk (yet) take the wheel — without MIRI backseat driving.

The advice CJ keeps giving them: “You need to be losing control of the narrative.” But, they added, “I’m not convinced that they’re willing to let go of being right.”