Matt Walsh: an AI video chat that passes for human is 'a disaster for the human race'
Matt Walsh @MattWalshBlog · x · 2026-10-02 · ★★ · archived
Most-viewed critical reaction to Tavus Griffin (~742k views), from a prominent US conservative commentator; shows cross-partisan backlash to human-passing avatars.
Summary
Walsh argues human-passing AI video chat has "no necessary legitimate applications", predicts scams against the elderly, romantic attachment, isolation and mental illness, and says its harms vastly outweigh its benefits.
Archived text
This is a disaster for the human race and I’ve really lost patience with the useless morons who can’t see that. An AI video chat that passes for human has no necessary legitimate applications. It will be used to scam old people out of their life savings. Lonely, mentally vulnerable people are going to form romantic attachments to people who aren’t real. Isolation will increase. Mental illness will skyrocket even more than it already has. Kids in grade school will have AI boyfriends and girlfriends. All of this will happen. And worse things we can’t even conceive at this point. People are already forming unhealthy emotional attachments to text-based LLMs. Once there’s an audio and visual component, it’s over. Millions of brains will be broken irreparably.
The benefits of this technology, whatever they are exactly, are so vastly outweighed by the societal catastrophe it will cause, and is already causing, that you can’t even measure the two categories on the same scale. But at least this is the best thing that ever happened to third world scammers. So if you’re in that community, congratulations.
Quoting @tavus: Introducing Griffin, the first model to pass the video Turing test.
48% of people who talked to it live thought it was a real human. Previous systems have had a pass rate <3%. It is #1 on NVIDIA's benchmark for full-duplex AI video.
It’s the first Human Interaction Model (HIM).
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Archived 2026-10-03 via fxtwitter (unofficial).
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