I have nothing against the honorable profession of writing blog posts on Sunday morning about the previous night’s episode of Saturday Night Live. I’ve edited many such blog posts in my time, while generally thinking, deep down, that watching SNL is mostly not worth it.
However, if you’re someone who follows the saga of AI, SNL’s segment from last night about Dario Amodei’s starring Jane Wickline as Amodei is worth watching. I would go as far as to say the segment, which focuses on Amodei’s doomsaying, is good. At one point, reader, I laughed.
You can probably guess from my tone that I would have gone about this differently if I were on the writing staff at Saturday Night Live (and there are many good reasons I’m not). I can’t say I love the structure, in which Michael Che acts as straight man, trying to get Amodei to voice some common sense upsides about AI. I also wouldn’t have settled on this conceit in which Amodei is conflicted like in the Gollum vs. Smeagol scene in the Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. I sort of doubt he’s really all that conflicted.
Then again, I’m not funny, and seeing Amodei’s routine get poked and prodded by an actually funny person is soothing. “AI is not a weapon. It’s a tool. A tool for building weapons, and I urge you to urge me to stop,” is a good line, and it made me feel like—for a brief moment—there was a drop of sanity in the public conversation around AI.