The phenomenon
In September 2026 a song about the fear of artificial intelligence became a genre – and the genre is produced by artificial intelligence. The song is called I’m Upping My P(doom). Its lyrics were written by two authors from the orbit of the AI safety scene, osmarks and MusicPerson; the music – a pop version now referred to as “Claude Pop” – was generated with the music model Suno and posted by a user going by deckard. Up to this point it would be a footnote of internet culture.
The videos turned it into a phenomenon. On September 24, Patryk Perduta released an animated “Official Music Video”: a satirical protest clip in which a narrator revises his personal probability of doom upward from zero percent in 2008, year after year, until the number goes through the roof. Three days later came the video most people have seen: the clip by the developer mexicat, viewed more than 55,000 times since, discussed on Hacker News and published as an open-source project on GitHub.
This second video is technically remarkable. It is not edited but rendered: every frame is a deterministic function of song time, the typography runs word by word with the vocals, and anyone who downloads the code can compute the clip in 4K themselves – identical to the browser preview down to the last pixel. The aesthetic is terminal and oscilloscope: amber vector lines on black, scanlines, forms of a fictional agency putting a number on the probability of doom. And its making is the actual point: according to the author, the concept, the lyric analysis, the renderer, every scene and every render were worked out in conversation with Claude in Claude Code – by a model that, in the song itself, is among the suspects.
Since September 22, “Claude Pop” has counted as a format of its own: music videos built by AI agents for an AI-doom song have become a small wave. The numbers are tiny by the standards of pop culture. By the standard of what they show, they are not. Within days the wave also produced its answer song, Nothing Went Foom!, which argues the opposite case.
Why it is an AIciety document
A song about the fear of the machine, set to music by a machine, filmed by a machine – that is not irony but the condition AIciety describes. The definition names as its second layer a society in which AI no longer merely disseminates communication but takes part in it. Here it takes part in the communication about itself. The discourse about the risk is co-authored by the very thing it is about.
Consider the production chain. Two people write a text. A model composes and sings it. A user publishes the recording. A developer asks a second model to build a video from it – not scene by scene, but as a program that generates scenes. The result is published freely, and anyone who wants to can recompute or alter it. No step of this chain required a permit, a budget or a publisher. Five years ago such a video would have cost a studio, a team and weeks. Today it costs a weekend and a subscription.
This is the “delegated agency” the definition names as its first threshold, in its cultural form: not corporations but individuals command means that used to be reserved for industries. The 2023 version of the AIciety Stages saw AI on the upper stages “handling creative tasks previously reserved for humans”. What actually happens is more precise: humans keep the idea, the taste and the publication – and delegate the making. Authorship has not disappeared; it has shifted to what machines do not supply: the notion of writing a doom song in the first place.
And the clip shows one more thing without meaning to. The model that built it did not soften the song. It lit the fear of itself in amber lines, with all the pathos the text allows. Anyone who worries that AI systems would suppress criticism of AI finds the counter-evidence here in high gloss – rendered by the accused.
What p(doom) is – and what it is not
p(doom) is a number between zero and one that states how likely someone considers the worst. “Doom”, in the common reading – and in the definition of this site’s p(doom) Clock – means human extinction caused by AI, or a permanent and severe loss of humanity’s ability to determine its own future. The Clock sets the horizon at the year 2042. Whoever says 0.05 considers it a one-in-twenty chance.
Three things p(doom) is not. It is not a frequency: there is no series of worlds in which one could count how often things went wrong. It is not a measurement: nobody has an instrument that could read the number off, and the International AI Safety Report 2026, the most comprehensive scientific assessment, deliberately gives none. And it is not a countdown: the number describes no date but a degree of belief, which may – and should – change with every new piece of information. That is exactly what the verb in the song’s title means. Whoever “ups” their probability has seen something that worries them and is honest enough to translate it into a number that can be held against them later.
What does the evidence say? The Safety Report holds that today’s systems lack the capabilities for a loss of control, but are improving in the relevant areas – autonomous operation, recognizing test situations. Forecasters put the probability of a dramatic acceleration by the end of the decade at 8 to 20 percent; that is not a probability of doom but the probability that the question becomes more urgent. Among experts, stated p(doom) values range from under one percent to well above fifty. This spread is not a scandal. It is the honest form of not knowing.
Why, then, does the number travel so well? Because it compresses an entire worldview into a scalar that can be named in a subordinate clause. “My p(doom) is ten percent” says more about someone than an essay: which arguments they weigh, which people they believe, how they handle uncertainty. The number is confession and membership card at once. The song knows this – which is why it is the chorus.
Doom as a genre
Societies sing about what they fear once the fear has become everyday. The nuclear age had its songs: Tom Lehrer’s cabaret about going together when we go, in 1959; two decades later the protest songs of the missile debate, the balloons that start a war. None of these pieces prevented a bomb. They did something else: they gave a fear too large to be spoken a form one can hum along to. That is not trivialisation. It is domestication – the cultural process by which a terror becomes part of life instead of paralyzing it.
I’m Upping My P(doom) stands in this line, and it stands at its end, because it turns the line one twist further. The song is satire from within: written by people who command the vocabulary of the AI safety scene and love and mock it at the same time. It is a catalog – paperclips, the basilisk, the Chinese room, the shoggoth, the “FOOM” of rapid self-improvement, the scaling laws. Twenty years of debate, compressed into three minutes of pop as if it were a folk song. What each of these figures means and where it comes from, a second post will unpack line by line; here it suffices to note that they exist and that they can be sung.
The pop form is itself the message. A chorus that revises a probability upward is the opposite of a manifesto: it is playful, self-mocking, inviting. It allows one to be afraid without having to decide whether one means it. And the Claude Pop videos – terminal aesthetics, agency forms, scanlines – quote the visual world in which the fear is at home and turn it into style. The apocalypse acquires a corporate design.
One can read this as cynicism. The opposite is more accurate: a society that can sing about its fears has not repressed them but accepted them. The Doomsday Clock of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, set to minutes before midnight since 1947, was the serious form of that acceptance. The p(doom) Clock is its continuation by other means – and I’m Upping My P(doom) is its soundtrack.
Who owns the number
The political career of p(doom) begins where the number changes hands – from the person who believes it to the institution that justifies with it. A high probability of doom is the strongest argument for restriction there is: to someone expecting a ten percent chance of extinction, every licensing requirement looks like a trifle. The problem is not that someone believes this number. The problem is that nobody can check it – and a probability that cannot be checked is, in the hands of an agency, not an argument but a blank check. It justifies every measure, because no measure can ever contradict it.
The song intuitively does the right thing. Its number is in the first person singular: my p(doom), not humanity’s, not the commission’s. It is stated, not decreed; revised, not fixed; and it is delivered in a form that invites everyone to hold their own against it. That is the only constitution in which such a number can exist honestly: public, personal, revisable. The liberal position on AI risk is not that there is none. It is that the assessment of the risk stays with those who bear it – and that rules attach to harms that have occurred, not to probabilities someone sets for others.
The verb in the title gives away one more thing. “Upping” is a revision, and revision is precisely what rules by prior permission cannot do. A law that in 2024 defined risk classes for systems that did not yet exist had to defer its obligations in 2026 – not because the risks vanished, but because the knowledge the obligations presupposed was missing. An individual who adjusts their number every week learns faster than any agency that writes its number into a statute. The sum of many such individuals learns fastest of all. That is the principle by which markets find prices, and it is the principle by which a society should measure its fear: not through one value someone sets for everyone, but through many values each person sets for themselves – visible to all.
Setting the clock
That is exactly what this site’s p(doom) Clock is for. It puts the song’s question to everyone who opens it: how likely is it that by the year 2042 AI causes human extinction or a permanent loss of humanity’s self-determination? You turn the hand, move the slider or type a number – and then see where the others stand. The clock shows the arithmetic mean of all active estimates; each browser counts once, the number may be reset every 24 hours, and every night a daily value is archived from which a trend line will one day be drawn.
The clock does not measure a risk. It measures what a self-selected community believes about a risk – and how that belief shifts when a new model appears, a law is deferred or a music video makes the rounds. That is less than some would wish and more than any agency can offer: a number that belongs to nobody except those who entered it, and that can be corrected every day. Whoever wants to up their probability after the song can do so here. Whoever wants to lower it, likewise.
A second post will read the lyrics of I’m Upping My P(doom) line by line – as a glossary of the figures, theories and jokes that twenty years of AI safety debate have produced.
Sources: mexicat: i’m upping my p(doom) (YouTube, September 27, 2026) · Code and documentation of the video (GitHub) · Patryk Perduta: Upping My P(doom) (Official Music Video) (YouTube, September 24, 2026) · International AI Safety Report 2026 · p(doom) Clock · What is AIciety?
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