The BlackVeil Files

In this investigative AI documentary, we pull five masks off the machine Silicon Valley sold us as a mind, featuring Ramesh Srinivasan, UCLA professor and author of Beyond the Valley. It starts with the traffic lights you clicked to prove you were human. It ends with two moves that put the choice back in your hands.

Every mask comes off with a document or the words of the people who built the machine: an unsealed OpenAI email weighing the optics of using copyrighted data from a "sketchy russian website," Kenyan workers paid less than $2 an hour to scrub the worst of the internet out of ChatGPT, a half-trillion-dollar build-out called Stargate, and wholesale power costs up as much as 267% near data centers. One of OpenAI's co-founders says predicting the next word means understanding reality. The man who studied reasoning takes that apart. Then come the bunkers.

Every step of this build-out was a business decision somebody made for profit, which means every step of it can be challenged. Ramesh thinks the public should own a piece of the companies built on its data. Would you call that a handout, or economic fairness?

Watch the full episode on YouTube → https://youtu.be/p_LLG8SkwGk

MORE FROM RAMESH
Utopias → https://www.youtube.com/@Utopias_Podcast
Website → https://rameshsrinivasan.org

🛒 Five masks, 15% off anything in the BlackVeil store, including the Shoggoth tee and the hardcover field journal. This link applies code BVF15 for you: https://the-blackveil-files-shop.fourthwall.com/promo/BVF15

FEATURING
Ramesh Srinivasan, Professor of Information Studies at UCLA, Director of the UC Digital Cultures Lab, author of Beyond the Valley, host of the Utopias podcast
Sam Altman, OpenAI, before the U.S. Senate and at the Stargate announcement
Mark Zuckerberg, Meta, at F8 2014 and before the U.S. Senate
Frances Haugen, former Facebook product manager, before the U.S. Senate
Ilya Sutskever, OpenAI co-founder, on the Dwarkesh Podcast
Yann LeCun, Turing Award winner, on the Lex Fridman Podcast
Tristan Harris, Center for Humane Technology, in The Social Dilemma
Gavin Newsom, Governor of California, State of the State 2019

CHAPTERS
0:00 The Man Who Helped Build It
1:00 1. It Runs On Your Stolen Data
2:15 The Sketchy Russian Website
3:14 2. The Cloud Is A Mine
5:01 Project Stargate
5:58 3. It's A Parasite, Not A Mind
7:06 Is It Just Autocomplete?
9:17 4. We Already Ran This Experiment
11:21 Why They're Buying Bunkers
12:51 5. It Was Never Neutral
13:43 Move One: Own A Piece Of It
14:44 Move Two: Stop Falling For The Pitch
15:42 Every Step Was A Choice

SOURCES
Breaking reCAPTCHAv2, ETH Zurich → https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.08831
Authors Guild v. OpenAI, unsealed filings → https://authorsguild.org/news/ag-v-openai-top-execs-knew-mass-book-piracy-was-illegal/
The Observer on Cambridge Analytica → https://www.theguardian.com/news/2018/mar/17/cambridge-analytica-facebook-influence-us-election
Facebook, Mike Schroepfer, Apr 2018 → https://about.fb.com/news/2018/04/restricting-data-access/
TIME on Kenyan data labelers → https://time.com/6247678/openai-chatgpt-kenya-workers/
OpenAI, Announcing The Stargate Project → https://openai.com/index/announcing-the-stargate-project/
Bloomberg on data center power bills → https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-data-centers-electricity-prices/
OpenAI, Introducing o1-preview → https://openai.com/index/introducing-openai-o1-preview/
Google DeepMind, IMO gold → https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/advanced-version-of-gemini-with-deep-think-officially-achieves-gold-medal-standard-at-the-international-mathematical-olympiad/
Shumailov et al., Nature 2024 → https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y
The Guardian on Tay → https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2016/mar/24/tay-microsofts-ai-chatbot-gets-a-crash-course-in-racism-from-twitter
Facebook S-1, 2012 → https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326801/000119312512034517/d287954ds1.htm

Commentary and criticism. Third-party audio excerpts appear under fair use.
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In this investigative AI documentary, we put the 15 biggest predictions Silicon Valley is making about your body in front of a man who rebuilds bodies for a living, featuring Dr. Som Kohanzadeh, double board-certified surgeon. 
Every item comes from government records, court filings, published research or the people building the machines.

Would you trust the machine with your life?
MORE ON DR. SOM
The Reconstructor on YouTube → https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCEwHlLVFgwOvlGvJxWYobPg
Consultations → https://drsom.com/reconstructor

🛒 15 predictions, 15% off anything in the BlackVeil store, including the hardcover journal I write my guest questions in. 

This link applies code BVF15 for you: https://the-blackveil-files-shop.fourthwall.com/promo/BVF15
SOURCES
CMS, WISeR payment methodology (1:30)
EFF, Medicare WISeR records (1:44)
Lokken v. UnitedHealth complaint (3:14)
ProPublica on Cigna, 2023 (3:43)
Sharp HealthCare scribe suit, alleged (6:05)
NBC News on OpenEvidence (7:52)
Microsoft MAI-DxO, 2025 (8:04)
Colonoscopy deskilling study, 2025 (10:29)
Utah and Doctronic agreement (11:43)
Dartmouth Therabot trial, NEJM AI (13:00)
OpenAI mental health data, 2025 (13:33)
Delphi-2M, Nature (14:20)
ASRM on polygenic embryo screening (16:16)
Makary and Prasad, NEJM, 2026 (17:52)
Merck and Moderna, phase 3 (18:44)
Johns Hopkins SRT-H, Science Robotics (21:35)
eGenesis pig kidney, Mass General (23:08)
Stanford inner speech study, Cell (25:01)
FDA Novel Drug Approvals (26:51)
Amodei, "Machines of Loving Grace" (27:42)
Nature Aging, odds of reaching 100 (27:54)
Life Biosciences, first patient (28:17)
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The full uncut interview with Dr. Roman Yampolskiy is on The BlackVeil Files +. Subscribe here: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2520178/subscribe
In this investigative AI documentary, we follow one physicist's attempt to prove we are not living in a simulation and the exact moment his own math turns against him.

Featuring AI safety pioneer Dr. Roman Yampolskiy, the researcher who has spent 20 years mapping how a superintelligence breaks loose.

Agent BlackVeil sits across from one of the few men who has read the documents and isn't panicking. That calm is the scary part.
FEATURING

Dr. Roman Yampolskiy, AI safety researcher at the University of Louisville and author of "AI: Unexplainable, Unpredictable, Uncontrollable." The work of his we walk through, with chapter markers:

"On Controllability of Artificial Intelligence" (2020) → https://arxiv.org/abs/2008.04071 … 16:37

"Personal Universes: A Solution to the Multi-Agent Value Alignment Problem" (2019) → https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.01851 … 18:02

"Detecting Qualia in Natural and Artificial Agents" (2017) → https://arxiv.org/abs/1712.04020 … 08:47

"Towards Solving Humor: Why the Funniest AI Joke Will Not Be Funny, to Us" (2025) → https://philarchive.org/rec/YAMTSH … 11:12

Also on the table:

Franco Vazza, "Astrophysical Constraints on the Simulation Hypothesis for This Universe" (Frontiers in Physics, 2025) → https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.08461 … 00:44

Buckminster Fuller → https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buckminster_Fuller … 21:47

Frederick Banting, who sold the insulin patent for $1 in 1923 → https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frederick_Banting … 19:20

H.P. Lovecraft, who gave us the Shoggoth in 1931 → https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shoggoth
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In this investigative AI documentary, we follow the two words that have become the strongest defense available to man. "That's AI". 

Every finding here comes from published research or out of a court record. 

The part that should worry an honest person is at the end. The liar gets the dividend. The man telling the truth about a fake gets nothing, because he's making the same noise the liar makes. 

FEATURING
Donald Trump, on a bag thrown from a White House window
Mitt Romney, 2002 Massachusetts gubernatorial debate, on a woman's right to choose
Todd Akin, St. Louis television, August 2012
Jordan Peele's synthetic Barack Obama, from the 2018 BuzzFeed PSA
Mark Robinson, former nominee for governor of North Carolina
Kaylyn Jackson Schiff, Purdue University, on CNN
Robert Chesney, University of Texas, who co-named the liar's dividend
Judge Madeline Singas, New York Court of Appeals, in dissent
Referencing the work of Hany Farid, Danielle Citron, Daniel Schiff and Natalia Bueno

SOURCES AND REFERENCES
Chesney and Citron, "Deep Fakes," California Law Review, 2019 (4:25)

Nightingale and Farid, synthetic faces rated more trustworthy than real ones, PNAS, 2022 (1:56)

Queen Mary University of London, voice clone listening study (2:40)

Berkeley voice clone study, 604 listeners (2:52)

Köbis et al., "Fooled Twice," iScience, 2021 (3:33)

Ternovski, Kalla and Aronow, warning labels and the liar's dividend, 2022 (4:57 and 5:36)

Christopher Penn, ZeroGPT and the Declaration of Independence, October 2024 (7:23)

Liang et al., Stanford, GPT detectors biased against non-native English writers, Patterns, 2023 (9:04)

OpenAI AI Text Classifier, withdrawn after roughly six months, 2023 (8:30)

Bloomberg, testing GPTZero and CopyLeaks on pre-ChatGPT admissions essays, 2024 (10:04)

Huang v. Tesla, order of Judge Evette Pennypacker, Santa Clara County Superior Court, 2023 (12:05)

United States v. Guy Reffitt, first January 6 trial, March 2022 (12:57)

Swansea University, Project TRUE, staged war crimes trial, 132 jurors (14:01)

New York Court of Appeals, February 2026, and People v. Patterson (15:17)

Federal Judicial Center survey of 931 federal judges (16:36)

Schiff, Schiff and Bueno, "The Liar's Dividend," American Political Science Review (18:24)

Murphy et al., false memories before the 2018 Irish referendum (20:28)

CNN reporting on Mark Robinson, September 2024 (22:42)

New York Times satellite imagery and Center for Information Resilience shadow analysis, Bucha, April 2022 (23:40)

Pikesville High School, Maryland, fabricated audio of principal Eric Eiswert (24:41)

Leica, Google Pixel 10 and Sony C2PA content credentials (27:25)
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On May 15, 1964, a factory owner fired 61,000 people to install one machine, and then got replaced by a machine himself.
In 2026, four companies are spending $725 billion on the same idea, and nobody in the chain has to call it a decision.
In this episode we break down Rod Serling's Twilight Zone episode "The Brain Center at Whipple's," and the thing almost nobody notices in it. The machine never chooses anything. It doesn't scheme, and it never once suggests that Whipple should go. Every choice in that hour is made by a person, and the people are the ones behaving like machinery.
Anthropic ran the same setup in a lab and got the same answer. So did Stanford, counting the jobs that are no longer being posted.
This isn't about robots. It's about what happens when a calculation outlives the last person willing to stop it.
SOURCES
The episode: "The Brain Center at Whipple's," The Twilight Zone, Season 5, Episode 33, aired May 15, 1964. Written by Rod Serling, directed by Richard Donner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/.../The_Brain_Center_at_Whipple%27s
The story that made Serling: "Patterns," Kraft Television Theatre, NBC, January 12, 1955. Restaged live on February 9, 1955, the first time television ever repeated a drama on demand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/.../Patterns_(Kraft_Television...
What the reruns were worth and what he got: https://www.syfy.com/.../why-twilight-zone-creator-rod...
The lab version: Anthropic, "Agentic Misalignment: How LLMs Could Be Insider Threats," June 20, 2025. Sixteen frontier models, Claude Opus 4 blackmailing in 96% of runs.
https://www.anthropic.com/research/agentic-misalignment
The jobs that stopped being posted: Brynjolfsson, Chandar and Chen, "Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence," Stanford Digital Economy Lab, August 2026 update, data through June 2026.
https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/news/canariesaug26/
What the four companies are spending: https://www.cnbc.com/.../google-microsoft-meta-amazon-ai...
Copyright Disclaimer: This episode is a transformative work of commentary and educational analysis. All third-party audio is used under the doctrine of Fair Use for the purpose of criticism, comment, and teaching.
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