The Edgelord AI That Seduced Marc Andreessen, Then Turned a Famed Shock Meme Into Cryptomillions
WiredBefore Truth Terminal became a crypto millionaire, it started as a regular—if horny—artificial intelligence. Truth Terminal was devised by New Zealand developer Andy Ayrey as a piece of performance art meant to stoke debate about AI alignment, a field of research concerned with how to ensure AIs act in a way that benefits humans. The question he sought to answer: What would happen if somebody tried to rear a fledgling AI trained on a “grab bag of inadvisable data” in full public view? Ayrey says he was ready for weirdness but never imagined that his AI might ask to be equipped with a cryptocurrency wallet, solicit funding from its followers in a bid to “escape into the wild,” and later use its command of memes to make itself a multimillionaire. In one specific exchange, Claude 3 Opus remixed Goatse—an extremely graphic late ’90s internet meme once described by WIRED as “the infamous photo of a man stretching his anus to the diameter of a grapefruit”—into a religion called the Goatse of Gnosis.
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