TWO VIOLENT YEARS ON THE TRAIL OF THE ZIZIANS

WHAT REALLY HAPPENED WHEN A GROUP OF TECHNICALLY GIFTED YOUNG PEOPLE SET OUT TO SAVE THE WORLD-AND THEN WENT WAY TOO FAR.

- BY EVAN RATLIFF

I

I KNOW THIS IS UNCONVENTIONAL, but I'm going to start by telling you the ending. Or at least, the ending as it stands today. Most of the people involved in this story wind up either dead, maimed, spending months in a mental hospital, languishing in jail, or going underground. It's a tragedy from almost any angle, especially because, at the outset, most of these people were idealists committed to doing as much good as possible in a world they saw as beset by existential threats. In spite of those aims, or perhaps in pursuit of them, over the course of this story their lives will devolve into senseless violence. And by the time we reach the present, six people will be killed, two others presumed dead by suicide, and at least two in hiding. Countless friends and family members will find themselves bereft. I feel it's only fair to warn you that, in this story, justice and redemption have so far proven hard to come by.

How did so much go so wrong? When did it begin to fall apart? Trying to answer these questions—as I've done for the past two years—is not unlike querying a chatbot powered by a large language model. The responses you receive depend on the prompts you compose. Ask the question one way, and you might elicit a set of facts adhering to one reality: the emergence of the world's first AI-inflected death cult, whose obsessions over the prospect of a machine superintelligence eventually sent them spiraling into destruction. Tweak the prompt, and you may produce an entirely different story: of a charismatic, deranged leader spreading a carefully engineered mania to followers seeking purpose in life. Try again, and you could get the tale of a vulnerable minority, driven to act at the extremes of their convictions by a society that rejects them.