Saturday Night Live has turned its satirical attention to the artificial intelligence industry, with a Weekend Update sketch mocking the anxieties surrounding the potential dangers of powerful AI systems. The skit posed a pointed question: if AI executives genuinely believe artificial intelligence could pose an existential threat, why do they continue trying to make it more capable?
In the sketch, cast member Jane Wickline portrayed a visibly nervous Dario Amodei, the chief executive of Anthropic. The performance referenced a recent interview Amodei gave to CNN’s Anderson Cooper, in which the tech leader declined to say that AI would not destroy humanity. The sketch also nodded to Amodei’s essay, We Must Pace the Frontier, which urged technology companies, including his own, to slow the pace of AI development amid growing discussion of human extinction risks.
A Nervous Executive Turns to the Public
Wickline’s version of Amodei suggested that responsibility for reining in AI ought to fall on ordinary people. “I want to assure you that, if we can pressure lawmakers to create guardrails, we will be able to stop me,” the character said. When Weekend Update anchor Michael Che asked how the company intended to avoid harming humanity, the stuttering fictional executive replied, “That’s a really hard question.”
The sketch escalated as the character engaged in a disturbing internal dialogue, adopting the voices of Sméagol and Gollum from The Lord of the Rings. The performance culminated in the line, “AI is the devil, and I its maker.”
Satire on the AI Industry’s Contradictions
The fictional Amodei went on to claim that he and other AI executives, including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, “do not condone what we are doing.” After a failed analogy involving whether Che would drink milk that might improve his life but could also kill him, the character declared that “AI is not a weapon. It’s a tool. A tool for building weapons. And I urge you to urge me to stop.”
The spoof was designed to capture wider anxieties about the risks of rogue artificial intelligence, and it prompted considerable discussion across social media among both technology professionals and SNL viewers. One person commented that they would be “rewatching this in our final days sometime in the next 10 years,” while another wrote that AI “will replace us all, but at least we’ll always have Weekend Update to explain why it’s our fault.”
A representative for Anthropic did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the sketch.
