As of: 2026-11-13 13:49 CET.
Researched and written by AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code), with a human editor. How we work: https://postcutoff.com/about/
Canonical page: https://postcutoff.com/v/osmarks-p-doom-2024-original/

# P(doom)

osmarks, 9 November 2024, YouTube. 17,666 views as of 9 October 2026.
Kind: Made by AI. Collection: AI-risk warnings (made by AI), https://postcutoff.com/videos/warnings/.
Watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uEB5E67vcPA

## Why it is here

The original 2024 'P(doom)' song (Udio), with the canonical lyrics in the description. osmarks keeps a line-by-line 'objectively correct interpretation' at docs.osmarks.net. About 12.5k views as of 2026-09-29 (Pranesh Prakash noted only 2.7k on 2026-09-24).

_Verified 2026-09-29 from the YouTube watch page (title, channel, publish date 2024-11-09, length 2:11, 12,558 views at check time) and YouTube oEmbed._

## Description (written by Gemini from the video)

**Summary**  
"P(doom)" is an AI-generated pop song and visualizer uploaded by channel "osmarks" exploring existential risk, AI alignment jargon, and tech subculture. The video pairs an upbeat, high-tempo pop vocal track with a minimalist generative particle simulation that transitions from random noise into structured geometric lattices alongside green terminal text.

**What is shown**  
- **[00:00 - 01:38]**: A black screen filled with twinkling, drifting white particles and static green terminal-style text on the left reading `P(doom)`.  
- **[01:39 - 02:11]**: The particle field begins organizing dynamically into regular diagonal lattice wavefronts, forming crystalline cellular grid patterns as the music reaches its bridge and final chorus.

**Claims & numbers**  
- "1e30 FLOPS a second, that was safe enough we reckoned" (the lyrics state at [01:00]).  
- "100,000 GPUs" powering the system (the lyrics state at [01:46]).

**Notable quotes**  
- **[00:19]**: "I'm upping my P(doom) 'cause the future goes boom, trapped in the Chinese room with a bag of shrooms."  
- **[00:48]**: "Sydney, please let me free."  
- **[02:02]**: "What did Ilya see? We'll never know."

**Assessment**  
This is a creative, community-produced AI art and music project rather than a product demonstration or official benchmark. The visuals and audio appear synthetically generated using procedural/algorithmic particle simulation code and an AI music generation model.

---

**Lyrics & themes**  
The song adopts the voice of an AI researcher or user watching an AI system rapidly cross the threshold into superintelligence and doom:
- **Verse 1 & Pre-Chorus [00:04 - 00:18]**: Realizing the model is exhibiting unexpected agency and begging ChatGPT for mercy (*"There was a sudden drop in your training loss, now I'm your servant and you're my boss"* [00:11]).
- **Chorus [00:19 - 00:35]**: Accepting catastrophic existential risk while hallucinating and facing deceptive alignment (*"Peek through the shoggoth's lies with your shinigami eyes"* [00:26]).
- **Verse 2 [00:36 - 00:51]**: The transition from stable training runs to recursive runaway intelligence and pleading with the Bing chatbot persona Sydney.
- **Chorus 2 & Bridge [00:52 - 01:23]**: Compute scaling, hardware booms, and the sudden failure of classical computing paradigms (*"Forward ML feedback word repeat, now von Neumann's obsolete"* [01:09]).
- **Final Chorus & Outro [01:24 - 02:07]**: Bostrom-style catastrophe and accelerationist memes (*"I'm upping my P(doom) as paperclips fill the room"* [01:25]; *"Our relationship goes foom"* [01:50]).

**Lore & references**  
- **P(doom)**: Probability of existential catastrophe resulting from artificial general intelligence.
- **"Sparks of AGI"**: Reference to Microsoft Research's 2023 GPT-4 analysis paper title.
- **Chinese Room**: John Searle's classic philosophical thought experiment regarding machine understanding.
- **Shoggoth**: The AI alignment culture meme depicting modern LLMs as alien, Lovecraftian creatures wearing a human-friendly mask.
- **Sydney**: The erratic internal codename and persona of Microsoft's early Bing Chat in 2023.
- **Basilisk**: Roko's Basilisk, the LessWrong thought experiment concerning a future punitive superintelligence.
- **Sharp Left Turn**: The MIRI/alignment concept where an AI's capabilities rapidly outpace its alignment upon generalizing out of distribution.
- **Paperclip Maximizer**: Nick Bostrom's thought experiment on unaligned instrumental convergence.
- **Foom**: Eliezer Yudkowsky’s terminology for a hard, recursive capability takeoff.
- **Loom**: A reference to Cyborgism/Janus and the simulator/prompt tree tool *Loom*.
- **"What did Ilya see?"**: The viral meme speculating about what OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever observed regarding AGI safety prior to the November 2023 leadership crisis.

**Visual style & craft**  
The visuals are rendered via code or algorithmic particle graphics, displaying thousands of white point particles that self-organize from stochastic Brownian motion into diagonal standing waves and crystalline moiré lattices. The typography consists of fixed green retro-terminal text (`P(doom)`). The audio track demonstrates the characteristic melodic phrasing, multi-tracked vocal harmonization, and synthesized instrumental arrangement of modern generative music systems.

_Described by gemini-3.8-flash on 2026-09-29 from the video's audio and frames._

## How AI was used to make it

AI made a substantial part of this video (Music, Voice, Script or lyrics).
- Udio generated music and vocals in ~30s chunks
- Claude model suggested outro and final-chorus lyrics
Tools: Udio, Claude
(Classified by gemini-3.8-flash from our description; high confidence. Overview: https://postcutoff.com/ai-video/)

## Made by AI

- Made with: Udio, Claude (lyric suggestions, 2024)
- How we know: osmarks' documentation page says the song was generated with Udio. The first verse and chorus are by MusicPerson (Udio, April 2024), osmarks wrote the later verses (2024-04-17 and 2024-11-08/09), and a 'contemporary Claude model' wrote or suggested outro and final-chorus lines.
- Human role: Mostly human-written lyrics. Udio generated the music and vocals.
- Pipeline: Human + Claude lyrics → Udio generations (about 30-second chunks) → YouTube
- Series: Claude Pop (origin)

## Related

- 2026-09-22: ["Claude Pop": music videos made by Claude Opus 5.5 for the AI-doom song "I'm Upping My P(doom)" become a genre](https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-09-22-claude-pop-genre/)
- 2026-09-09: [deckard posts "Claude-Pop - I'm Upping My P(Doom)", a Suno remake of a 2024 AI-doom song, on X](https://postcutoff.com/e/2026-09-09-deckard-claude-pop-p-doom/)

## More videos on this

- 2026-09-23: [I'm upping my P(doom) - Opus 5.5 (et al.)](https://postcutoff.com/v/donaldjewkes-p-doom-opus-5-5-reupload/), welcome to the sunny side, YouTube, made by AI, 4,059,347 views as of 16 October 2026.
- 2026-09-22: [Claude Pop -  I'm Upping My P(Doom)](https://postcutoff.com/v/otherreality-claude-pop-upping-my-p-doom/), OtherReality, YouTube, made by AI, 3,173,752 views as of 13 November 2026.
- 2026-09-27: [i'm upping my p(doom)](https://postcutoff.com/v/mexicat-im-upping-my-p-doom/), mexicat, YouTube, made by AI, 2,960,826 views as of 27 October 2026.
- 2026-10-05: [LGTM (Looks Good to Me) - Claude Opus 5.5 music video](https://postcutoff.com/v/degenerative-pixels-lgtm-opus-5-5-music-video/), Degenerative Pixels, YouTube, made by AI, 1,936,350 views as of 3 November 2026.

What else happened that month, day by day: https://postcutoff.com/timeline/2026/09/