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Brian Merchant on AI · ViralLoop

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Post by Brian Merchant on X

Brian Merchant@bcmerchant

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

488 likes6 repliesPosted May 21, 2024

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

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35

Viral score

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.
Quotes someone directly, which makes the moment concrete rather than summarised.

The mechanics

Hook: Plain observation
Structure: Hook → Landing
Style: Conversational paragraphs at a steady pace.
Tone: energetic
Written for: People building with AI

Analysis by ViralLoop — not written by the original author.

Topics

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Universal HIGH INCOME via checks issued by the Federal government is the best way to deal with unemployment caused by AI. AI/robotics will produce goods & services far in excess of the increase in the money supply, so there will not be inflation.

I am very excited about AI, but to go off-script for a minute: I built an app with Codex last week. It was very fun. Then I started asking it for ideas for new features and at least a couple of them were better than I was thinking of. I felt a little useless and it was sad.

Hi! I'm one of the prompt writers that worked on this ad. It's a lot harder than people think! Prompts that my team used include: -make it funny -make it epic AND funny -funnier!!! Please be nice to my team as many of them will be laid off/replaced by AI

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.

"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

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.