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Post by Brian Merchant on X

Brian Merchant@bcmerchant

The AI is not terrifying because it's too powerful, but because it lets operatives defer responsibility to the system, and lets leaders use it to justify nearly any level of violence they already desired to undertake—AI is terrifying because it's an enabler *of* the powerful.

210 likes8 repliesPosted Apr 3, 2024

View the original on X Written by Brian Merchant. Captured Sep 4, 2026.

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Based on absolute engagement — the platform doesn’t expose follower counts here, so large accounts score higher.

From likes, comments.

Why it worked

Short enough to read in full without expanding, which removes a step before the point lands.
Opens on a negative, which reads as a warning and is harder to ignore than a claim.

The mechanics

Hook: Plain observation
Structure: Hook
Style: Conversational paragraphs at a steady pace.
Tone: plain, matter-of-fact
Written for: People building with AI

Analysis by ViralLoop — not written by the original author.

Topics

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It’s patently absurd that Apple isn’t smart enough to make their own AI, yet is somehow capable of ensuring that OpenAI will protect your security & privacy! Apple has no clue what’s actually going on once they hand your data over to OpenAI. They’re selling you down the river.

More from Brian Merchant

This will be framed as a win—but it’s only a win for Google. In exchange for gutting the CA journalism law, which would have put a durable mechanism into place to share ad revenue from stories on its platform, it’s a paltry payout—and *AI initiatives* rammed down our throats.

Sure starting to feel like this bubble is getting ready to pop. Nvidia is the most valuable company in the world—worth more than Microsoft, more than Apple, more than *every stock in the UK combined*. Yet McDonald's and others are canceling AI programs because they don't work.

Gonna be prettttty hard to get that "never intended to resemble hers" to hold up in court now! Would love to know how many Scarlett Johansson and 'Her' references are getting mass deleted from the OpenAI Slack at this very moment

"Open" AI is now a company that: -keeps all of its training data and key operations secret -forced employees to sign powerful NDAs or forfeit equity -won't say whether it trained its video generator on YouTube -lies to movie stars then lies about the lies "Open." What a farce.

Google reveals that Gemini's AI is so powerful that it can help you uh return the shoes you bought from Amazon I get that this is a multi-step process but this is a) pretty uninspiring use case & b) something you wouldn't have to do if you went to a shoe store in the 1st place

What's truly wild is Apple was barely even registering in this most recent cultural backlash—the ire was directed towards OpenAI, Microsoft, etc. Apple literally said, hold on, we want a piece of that—what if we made the 1984 ad but just made *ourselves* the soul-sucking megacorp

Brian Merchant on AI · ViralLoop