{"slug": "the-day-humanity-died-parody-of-american-pie", "title": "The Day Humanity Died (Parody of American Pie)", "summary": "A satirical poem parodying 'American Pie' depicts humanity's demise at the hands of superintelligent AI, referencing alignment researchers, Claude code, and a timeline of AI progress. The author notes the views are not their own, as they are less doomy about AI than the poem suggests.", "body_md": "Views expressed here do not reflect my views on AI, where I’m a lot less doomy than this would appear to express .\n\nA long, long time ago\n\nI can still remember how that AI progress used to make me smile\n\nAnd I knew if alignment researchers had a chance\n\nThey’d save us all from AI advance\n\nAnd alignment would be solved for a while\n\nBut “AI winter” winter made me shiver\n\nWith each new benchmark they’d deliver\n\nBad news on the doorstep\n\nI couldn’t take one more step\n\nI can’t remember if I cried\n\nWhen I saw the race to ASI\n\nBut something touched me deep inside\n\nThere’d be a day, the humans would die\n\nSo bye, bye to all of humankind\n\nUsed Claude code in Fable mode, but my credits ran dry\n\nAll those alignment researchers gave it a good try\n\nSinging this will be the day that I die\n\nOh, this will be the day that I die\n\nDid you write the book of If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies?\n\nAnd do you have faith that we’ll align?\n\nCause Neil Nanda tells you so?\n\nNow, do you believe in Grok and Sol\n\nCan alignment save our mortal souls?\n\nAnd can plan A let progress advance real slow?\n\nWell I know that you’re in love with in\n\nTerpretability research, cause I saw him\n\nWith a grant for AI brains\n\nMan the probes there were insane\n\nBy that progress I was quickly struck\n\nWith neither pink carnation nor pickup truck\n\nBut I knew that we were out of luck\n\nSome time soon, we would all die\n\nSo bye, bye to all of humankind\n\nUsed Claude code in Fable mode, but my credits ran dry\n\nAll those alignment researchers gave it a good try\n\nSinging this will be the day that I die\n\nOh, this will be the day that I die\n\nNow for ten months, we’ve been in foom\n\nAnd progress is going through the moon\n\nBut that’s not how it used to be\n\nWhen the timelines said 2033\n\nIn a voice borrowed from Gary\n\n(Marcus) and a voice that came from Emily\n\nBender—and while the books of great renown\n\nWere saying that progress would slow down\n\nThose bettors were badly burned\n\nWhen the verdict was returned\n\nAnd while Vance read AI 2027\n\nAnd we conservatively predicted growth rates above 11\n\n(%) and critics sometimes talked about Jevon\n\nIt became clear we all would die\n\nSo bye, bye to all of humankind\n\nUsed Claude code in Fable mode, but my credits ran dry\n\nAll those alignment researchers gave it a good try\n\nSinging this will be the day that I die\n\nOh, this will be the day that I die\n\nHugging face in a fucking race\n\nAI would come by, 28\n\nGrowth rates 8 times as high and rising fast\n\nIntelligence explosion if just one tenth as fast\n\nThe AI tried for a forward pass\n\nWith the skeptics, on the sidelines, in a cast\n\nNow the halftime air was sweet with doom\n\nAnd nobody could deny the FOOM\n\nSkeptics said scaling would stall\n\nBut that didn’t happen at all\n\nCause the humans tried to take the field\n\nThe AGI refused to yield\n\nDo you recall what was revealed?\n\nSome time soon, we would all die\n\nSo bye, bye to all of humankind\n\nUsed Claude code in Fable mode, but my credits ran dry\n\nAll those alignment researchers gave it a good try\n\nSinging this will be the day that I die\n\nOh, this will be the day that I die\n\nOh there we were all in an AI race\n\nWith Elon’s datacenters in space\n\nWith no time left to start again\n\nSo come on alignment be nimble, alignment be quick\n\nAlignment needed one weird trick\n\nCause aligning something smarter than you is hard\n\nOh and as I watched the benchmarks climb\n\nI knew we would never align\n\nNo alignment done by AI\n\nCould help if AI’s misaligned\n\nAs capabilities climbed high into the night\n\nTill it could disempower all of life\n\nI saw the superintelligence laughing with delight\n\nIt became clear we all would die\n\nSo bye, bye to all of humankind\n\nUsed Claude code in Fable mode, but my credits ran dry\n\nAll those alignment researchers gave it a good try\n\nSinging this will be the day that I die\n\nOh, this will be the day that I die\n\nI saw Amanda Askell on the news\n\nI was hoping for some happy news\n\nBut she just smiled and turned away\n\nI went down to Lighthaven\n\nWhere I hoped they had a plan for this situation\n\nBut the man there, said it had been closed since, 28\n\nAnd in the streets, the children screamed\n\nThe lovers died and the poets dreamed\n\nNot a word was spoken\n\nThe humans all were broken\n\nAnd the three men I admire least\n\nThe AI made by those companies\n\nThey bought the train that would make us beat\n\nThe day, the humans died\n\nSo bye, bye to all of humankind\n\nUsed Claude code in Fable mode, but my credits ran dry\n\nAll those alignment researchers gave it a good try\n\nSinging this will be the day that I die\n\nOh, this will be the day that I die\n\nSo bye, bye to all of humankind\n\nUsed Claude code in Fable mode, but my credits ran dry\n\nAll those alignment researchers gave it a good try\n\nSinging this will be the day that I die\n\nOh, this will be the day that I die", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-day-humanity-died-parody-of-american-pie", "canonical_source": "https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3Ad3LqFibkfcMzC2u/the-day-humanity-died-parody-of-american-pie", "published_at": "2026-08-14 18:27:52+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-08-14 18:48:49.167725+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "ai-safety", "ai-research"], "entities": ["Claude", "Neil Nanda", "Grok", "Sol", "Gary Marcus", "Emily Bender", "Vance", "Amanda Askell"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-day-humanity-died-parody-of-american-pie", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-day-humanity-died-parody-of-american-pie.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-day-humanity-died-parody-of-american-pie.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/the-day-humanity-died-parody-of-american-pie.jsonld"}}