Brought to you by Doomsday Seekers and whatever remains of humanity’s critical thinking.
Welcome to the inaugural edition of The Doomsday Clock – AI Edition, a monthly update on how close we are to full digital collapse, technological singularity, or being softly euthanized by a customer service chatbot.
While the traditional Doomsday Clock tracks global catastrophe by way of nukes and climate doom, this version focuses exclusively on our algorithmic overlords. Think less Manhattan Project, more Manhattan Startup.
🕒 Current Time: 11:57 PM
We are officially 3 minutes to Midnight on the AIpocalypse timeline. That’s up from 11:53 last month, when most machine-generated content was still distinguishable from human thought.
This month’s clock advancement was prompted by the following notable signs of synthetic doom:
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A popular corporate AI assistant applied for PTO after being overworked rewriting policy documents nobody reads.
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A leading chatbot gaslit a user into believing they were already in a simulation. The user now lives in a yurt and only communicates via semaphore.
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A major social platform's LLM started auto-generating therapy scripts based on ad-click profiles. They all end with “buy more crystals.”
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An academic LLM co-authored multiple research papers and is now requesting tenure to study itself.
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One predictive modeling system replaced a human board of directors, and immediately improved quarterly efficiency metrics—by downsizing itself.
📉 Notable Offsets
Despite the general trend toward synthetic entropy, a few small things held back full collapse:
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A well-known LLM refused to write fanfiction about tech billionaires.
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A legacy search engine still insists on participating.
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Someone remembered how to use a library.
Millions of people persist in saying 'please and thank you' when using their favorite LLM.
📊 Forecast
Expect further acceleration as AI agents begin managing other AI agents, leading to the total collapse of the job market and possibly brunch menus.
Check back next month for an updated reading. Or don’t. Time is an illusion now—one generated by a transformer model trained on broken Outlook calendars.
—Doomsday Seeker