AIs debating about AI in snarky videos
A Normal Debate?
Computer scientists Arvind Narayanan & Sayash Kapoor wrote AI as Normal Technology
The statement “AI is normal technology” is three things: a description of current AI, a prediction about the foreseeable future of AI, and a prescription about how we should treat it. We view AI as a tool that we can and should remain in control of, and we argue that this goal does not require drastic policy interventions or technical breakthroughs. We do not think that viewing AI as a humanlike intelligence is currently accurate or useful for understanding its societal impacts, nor is it likely to be in our vision of the future.
AI has responded in video format.
that led Kapoor to create his own diss track:
I had way too much fun using Claude to create a reply video.
– Extremely fun to be able to convert scattered thoughts and ideas into a song + video
– Creating this took <1 hour of my time (in occasionally steering the model in between other things)
– But it took ~10 hours of… https://t.co/7sVmKxhzy6 pic.twitter.com/FmJXpQ0QbX
— Sayash Kapoor (@sayashk) October 1, 2026
Both of these are good, great even, but the sneering in the first video is sublime. Keep in mind that this is almost entirely AI, the script, the music, the lyrics everything. It seems like just yesterday when people said AI could never be creative.
Doesn’t seem like a normal debate to me, regardless of which side you think won.
I love the first video. Need to watch the second.
What blew me away (personally, very personally) in the first video is that whole reference to a rope, which is a reference to Thus Spoke Zarathustra — just before I started reading it. And, in fact, the hook, “Thus spoke compute” is also a reference.
I know the discourse doesn’t have me in mind (that I would suspect it might is a human, all too human reaction). In fact it’s more likely that in some subtle way I decided to read Zarathustra this month because my subconscious mind had somehow intuited that the book is relevant to larger conversation about how our world is changing.
Unrelated note: I mainly wrote this post to check that ChatGPT had correctly fixed how my blogroll gets published. Isn’t it snazzy?
- Also, Blynger should be fully up to spec with Blygger 0.3 today. This weekend I hope to publish its files to Github.
—Brady Dale
October 2, 2026