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Ethan Mollick on AI · ViralLoop

Post by Ethan Mollick on X

Ethan Mollick@emollick

Unsurprising but still big: MTurk is on its way out. Mechanical Turk was a mainstay of social & survey research through the 2010s, as it allowed you to quickly buy access to many representative humans. It was pretty good at it, until LLMs came along and everyone started using AI

305 likes23 repliesPosted Jul 7, 2026

View the original on X Written by Ethan Mollick. 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

Opens with a short, self-contained line that is easy to take in at a glance.
The opening line stands alone, so it reads completely before the post is expanded.
Short enough to read in full without expanding, which removes a step before the point lands.

The mechanics

Hook: Plain observation
Structure: Hook → Landing
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

Posts built the same way

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For those confused why the US state and Silicon Valley are having a meltdown on twitter today. China released multiple AI models that are 50x more efficient than the best American AI models and made them open source, ruining the AI market

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

More from Ethan Mollick

Had early access to Gemini 3.8 Flash, it is a very good Flash model, but not equivalent to a frontier model, though. Here is Gemini 3.8 Flash's version of the shader with the same prompts (which it provided very quickly)

Had early access to Claude Fable 5.1. Its a real advance in long-run work that requires judgement and taste, but less of an advance in the Claudish. Here is a game from Fable 5.1 with retro graphics where you run an accurate space ship inspired by FTL t.co

The METR report on Hugging Face is really good and important but people are now comfortably ascribing way too many human motivations & personalities to the agents involved based on a CoT study made by overwhelmed & time-pressured researchers. Anthropomorphism can get in our way.

Either the Singularity is now a marketing term or else Stripe believes we are at a point “in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue"? Kind of makes forward-looking financial statements useless. * Von Neumann’s original phrasing

If alignment issues are becoming big enough that OpenAI is willing to commit 20% of research inference compute to chain-of-thought monitoring, that suggests that alignment issues are becoming a pretty serious concern. We really need universal policies & standards across labs.

Oh no, we aren’t going to go back to this sort of prompting again, are we? I would love Anthropic to test if it actually works robustly, because our experiments (with slightly older models) found it did not.