We discuss AI doomers, 9/11 posting, and Barbie.#BehindTheBlog
Behind the Blog: How to Talk About AI Doom
This is Behind the Blog, where we share our behind-the-scenes thoughts about how a few of our top stories of the week came together. This week, we discuss AI doomers, 9/11 posting, and Barbie.JOSEPH: I do always get emotional on 9/11 because it’s the moment everything changed. Rather than repeat those feelings that I’m sure you’ve heard a million times from various people, I’ll point to a couple of reporting projects that I think capture the day really well.
First is the 2001 Live (@25YearsAgoLive) X account. This account obviously has been tweeting throughout the year, and it just so happens that today is 9/11. Check out one of the first tweets from this morning:
During a shooting of NBC’s Today in Lower Manhattan, Mr. Peanut makes a surprise appearance!How fun - now the mascot will have the delightful experience of walking around Lower Manhattan and seeing the day through the eyeholes of his Mr. Peanut costume. pic.twitter.com/6HbBPlMech
— 2001 Live (@25YearsAgoLive) September 11, 2026
Then, the next tweet:This is just coming in: there appears to be a major fire on the upper floors of one of the towers of the World Trade Center in New York City.Reports claim that a small plane, either a Cessna or a private jet, accidentally flew into the tower around the 80th floor, due to… pic.twitter.com/yORLClF3fA
— 2001 Live (@25YearsAgoLive) September 11, 2026
Scrolling through the account is a fascinating way to remind yourself of some of the individual stories of people from that day, or learn some new ones.I’ve also been reading a site called Watches of Espionage a lot. They published this write-up about Todd Beamer, one of the passengers on Flight 93 who fought the hijackers. His gold Rolex, recovered from the plane’s crash site, is frozen on the date 11. I might try to get Watches of Espionage on the pod but I imagine that might be unlikely given they are a former CIA case officer and a disclaimer at the bottom of the newsletter says it has been reviewed by the CIA’s prepublication review board.
I am also going to try to listen to more of Garrett Graff’s incredible oral history of 9/11. This is full of stories of individual heroism you have probably never heard before. I listened to maybe a third of it and had to stop for a bit because it got really intense. Maybe it would be better to read rather than listen. But it’s the richest history of the day you’re probably going to find.
SAM: Quick one from me today. Keeping on theme with Joe’s 9/11 posting, this morning I saw this amazing archive posted by custom doll maker John Pickles about how the Barbie franchise coped with the attacks.
Mattel ran a website called GenerationGirl.com, which is archived here. Part of it was “exclusive access to the private bulletin board of the Generation Beat editorial staff!” meaning Barbie universe characters chatting on a message board.
Mostly it was cute mundane stuff about Barbie and her friends’ hijinks. But on Sept. 13, an uncredited post appeared:
“Mattel and all the dolls and toys from Mattel want to reassure you that we are all fine. Barbie and the Generation Girls, and their family and friends are all safe. We know that many of our friends are saddened this week. Be sure you talk with a grown up about your feelings. If you want to cheer up someone who may be sad, you can draw a picture or write a letter.”
And then some messages from Barbie and Nichelle, who is apparently canonically from NYC:
BARBIE: Just a quick note to say I got an e-mail from Chelsie. She wanted to know that everyone was OK.
NICHELLE: That was so sweet of her.
BARBIE: I told her we were all fine, and she was SOOO happy.
NICHELLE: You know, I'm really glad to be home with my parents today, but it's gonna be great to see everyone when we get back to school.
BARBIE: I know what you mean, Nich. Well - I'd better get going. Just wanted to check in.
NICHELLE: I'm REALLY glad you did. Talk to you in school!
About a week later, they start posting again:
BARBIE: Wow. I can't believe what a busy week this has been.
TORI: I love the idea that Ana had - to make cookies and take them to the volunteers who are helping clean up the downtown area.
MARI: You know it. Especially because her mom's cookies are so GOOD!
NICHELLE: It's been really sad in New York this week. But doing all this stuff made me feel like I was helping out a little.
MARI: I spent some time with my little brother's friends. I was showing them how to make cards on the computer, and then we took them to our local fire station. Some of those cards were fantastic!
BARBIE: Cool! That's a great way to use your computer skills, Mar.
MARI: Yeah - it felt pretty good. The firemen and policemen have been doing an amazing job.
NICHELLE: Even though it's been a rough week, I'm SOOO proud to be a New Yorker this week!
There’s been much written and said about the post-9/11 reaction of kids’ entertainment like Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel attempting to address how children coped with the news. But I thought this little snapshot of a brand obviously feeling like it has to say something, and working it into the plot of the characters, was interesting to me.
JASON: I think this is the last I’ll be yammering about an event we’ve done for a moment (til the next one), but last night we did a live podcast with The Intercept about the use of AI in surveillance and war. A recording will be available sometime next week in our feeds and their feeds as well. I’ve been a fan of The Intercept for a long time, and admire how they’ve managed to keep their newsroom afloat after losing their funding from Pierre Omidyar. They’re a bigger newsroom than us but are also independent and are a bit of an inspiration for me in terms of how to possibly do some of the things we’re doing at a bigger scale one day. They’ve been good partners to us, and we’re thankful to them for throwing this event with us.
One thing that was clear at the event is that we need to figure out how to talk about the big AI companies and the potential threat they pose. There were lots of audience questions about the now very viral Anthropic-we’re-all-gonna-die tweets. Emanuel tried to talk about this in his Behind the Blog a few weeks ago and it’s something I’ve been grappling with since then. I think 404 Media has carved out a very nice niche of covering the impacts that AI is having today—how it is already changing society and is leading in many cases to bad outcomes.
But we have largely sat out the “OpenAI rogue agents hack HuggingFace” story, the AI doomers singularity risk, things like this. I think everyone in this world is right: The DOOM stuff serves as good marketing for these companies, and I do not think AI is imminently going to kill us all. But it is also indisputable that idiot human beings directing AI (or not knowing how to direct AI) is leading to some pretty bad things happening, and it is easy to imagine how this is about to get worse. It sort of doesn’t matter whether AI is “reasoning” or not or whether AI is very bad at doing lots of basic things, the fact of the matter is that people can throw huge amounts of compute at something and the AI will keep trying to do that thing, and there’s all sorts of various ways this can and is going sideways. I haven’t fully gone through Anthropic’s threat report from yesterday, but I have been assured it is at the very least entertaining reading and highlights the diversity of ways in which people are attempting to do objectively bad shit with AI.
I have an article coming out sometime next week about AI agents that addresses a little bit of this that I’m hoping people will like. But basically it has become clear to me this week that people are at least interested in having this discussion about AI fucking things up in a more substantial way than we’ve already seen, and it’s one we’ve sort of been ignoring. We have kind of avoided it in part because it’s so fraught and easy to anthropomorphize the AI or to say something very dumb, but enough random people I know have texted me this week asking if we’re all going to die that I do think we will try to find a way to intelligently enter this conversation.
EMANUEL: In lieu of a written BTB, Emanuel (and Jason) did a video BTB today about whether AI is going to kill us all. Watch it here.
So... Is AI Going to Kill Us All???
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