Everywhere I Look, I See Kat Woods

post by just_browsing · 2025-01-15T19:29:10.373Z · LW · GW · 4 comments

Contents

  She’s everywhere
  I don’t like the content 
  I don’t like the vibes
  I don’t like the conduct
  I know, I know, the content isn’t for me. but who is it for? Is it working? 
  What would I do instead 
  Why did I write a public blog post
None
4 comments

Why does she write in the LinkedIn writing style? Doesn’t she know that nobody likes the LinkedIn writing style? 

Who are these posts for? Are they accomplishing anything? 

Why is she doing outreach via comedy with posts that are painfully unfunny?

Does anybody like this stuff? Is anybody’s mind changed by these mental viruses? 

Is this what community building and outreach looks like in 2025?

Two of my guilty pleasures are Reddit and Facebook. Lately, I’ve been noticing a deluge of posts by one power user: Kat Woods (katxwoods on Reddit). I think these posts are bad, and my futile downvotes accomplish nothing, so instead I am writing this blog post. 

One upfront caveat. I am speaking about “Kat Woods” the public figure, not the person. If you read something here and think, “That’s not a true/nice statement about Kat Woods”, you should know that I would instead like you to think “That’s not a true/nice statement about the public persona Kat Woods, the real human with complex goals who I'm sure is actually really cool if I ever met her, appears to be cultivating.” 

She’s everywhere

She’s all over the EA and AI-related subreddits /r/singularity, /r/artificial, /r/ArtificialIntelligence, /r/ChatGPT, /r/OpenAI, /r/Futurology, posting multiple times per day, often cross posting the same content between subs. She clearly knows the tricks to increase engagement, and therefore reach, of her posts: punchy titles and direct image/video posts (as opposed to external links). Chances are, if you are subscribed to these subreddits on the app, you’ve seen her content in your home feed.

I don’t like that she is everywhere on these subs, cross-posting the same content, generating the same discussions, because it reduces the variance in my information diet. Previously, these subs all had distinct vibes to them, and they were helpful for understanding different kinds of peoples’ attitudes toward AI as it rapidly developed. Now they all house the same engagement-farming slop.[1]

I don’t like the content 

I think the content she specifically creates is kind of bad. Here is some example content that she appears to have created[2] in the last few months (all posted to Dank EA Memes). I don’t like this content, I think it’s unfunny and cringe. 

 

 

 

 

But actually, the vast majority of content she posts is not content she created. She’ll post screenshots of tweets, memes about related subjects (e.g. philosophy, productivity, history) that are somewhat relevant to EA and AI, and articles/videos with catchy titles. She’s optimizing for engagement rather than quality, so the quality of this content varies. One representative example from each category:

 

 

 

Overall, the content she posts feels like engagement bait. It feels like it is trying to convince me of something rather than make me smarter about something. It feels like it is trying to convey feelings at me rather than facts. It feels like it is making me stupider. 

To give an analogy, it feels like PETA content. When I initially went vegan, it wasn’t PETA content that convinced me. It was Brian Tomasik content and videos of grinding male chicks. While it’s true that I am "out of distribution" so to speak, popular consensus is that PETA’s attempts at memetic content are mostly cringe. Kat Woods, why would you want to make content like that?

I don’t like the vibes

I don’t like the vibes. She has this cringe millennial brand of comedy that feels painfully dated. It feels like a meme that a brand would make. Remember these fake facebook comment threads? From like, 2010?

She’s still making and/or spreading them! In 2024! 

She also makes “motivational” posts in the style of LinkedIn engagement bait. An example from Dank EA Memes:

Cringe. There’s no other word for it. This makes me cringe. It’s embarrassing.

I get that not every social media post on AI has to be an academic paper or a thoughtful blog post. I just don’t like the “dark arts” tactics. The content is trying to make me feel a certain way, rather than think a certain way. 

Because of Kat Woods’ volume (which, even if she only accounts for ~10% of the posts in a particular community, is amplified by her use of engagement-boosting tactics), she is having a tangible impact on the overall vibes of the communities she is posting in. I miss when /r/artificial, /r/OpenAI, /r/singularity, and others consisted mostly of links to articles, or earnest accounts of peoples’ (diverse!) perspectives on AI. I miss when /r/EffectiveAltruism was mostly a Q&A sub for those new to effective altruism, consisting of thoughtful text threads. I miss when Dank EA Memes was for the ingroup. 

I don’t like the conduct

Kat Woods often doesn’t give proper credit when spreading memes. For example, recently she posted a video from a small creator (<1k YouTube subscribers) to Reddit, by re-uploading it to Reddit rather than linking to the original YouTube source. This likely has the effect of boosting engagement at the expense of the creator’s channel growth.[3]

Just because Kat Woods herself doesn’t care about her creations being attributed to her (see below screenshot from Dank EA Memes, less than a month ago), doesn’t mean that many people in online spaces don't expect appropriate attribution. 

Secondly, I don’t like the excessive reposting. Below is an unedited screenshot of an example (of /u/katxwoods’ post history). As someone who is subscribed to all of the subreddits Kat Woods is a power poster in, this just results in my Reddit feed being full of repetitive garbage. She also recycles and reposts older content, making the content in these subreddits even more stale. (The fact that her meme brain is stuck in the 2010s doesn't help.)

I know, I know, the content isn’t for me. but who is it for? Is it working? 

One reason somebody might post a lot of memes about EA and AI Safety is that they want to convince more people of EA and AI Safety ideas. So then, first of all, I’m not the target audience for her content. I get that.[4] I can still be grumpy that Kat Woods has caused shifts in certain online communities, resulting in me no longer being part of the target audience. But if it’s for the greater good, maybe I should just stop being grumpy. 

But honestly, is this content for the greater good? Are the clickbait titles causing people to earnestly engage? Are peoples’ minds being changed? Are people thinking thoughtfully about the facts and ideas being presented? 

I don’t know. It seems like Kat Woods is spending a lot of time making these posts. Maybe, in true EA spirit, she’s also put effort into quantifying her impact. I want to give Kat Woods the person the benefit of the doubt here. But I don’t know. The content she puts out feels more like cheetos (chemicals and air) than nutrient-rich cheese. Certainly, personally, her content feels bad for my brain. I encourage you to check out her Reddit post history for yourself, rather than relying on my hastily put-together examples, to draw your own conclusions.

What would I do instead 

Kat Woods, allow me -- a person with no qualifications or background in social media content creation, other than being at least half a decade younger than and significantly more “online” than you -- to give my takes on what I’d do instead. 

So first of all, I have my opinions on how I wish Dank EA Memes was still niche ingroup memes, /r/EffectiveAltruism was still a place for earnest questions by people new to EA, and /r/singularity was still a low-volume sub consisting mostly of external links to articles. I won’t say more about this.

What I would like to say more about is outreach. If the goal is to post content that reaches new people and changes (young) minds, I feel like millennial-style memes are perhaps not the way to go. Here are some brief thoughts on what to do instead if this was my job:

Why did I write a public blog post

The impetus for my writing this post is that I want to know whether anyone else has been experiencing what I am experiencing, because I am a weak-willed self-obsessed human that wants external validation. 

Separately, whether or not you specifically browse the online communities I mention here, I think it’s important to notice when content you are consuming is bad (even if it doesn't obviously seem bad at a first glance). Maybe this post will help you recognize patterns in content that is bad, which will in turn help you avoid it. 

  1. ^

    To the extent that Reddit and Facebook as platforms are more aggressively creating selection pressures for engagement bait, Kat Woods cannot be blamed for this phenomenon alone. However, when it comes to a small online community, engagement bait can spread and "infect" the community by outcompeting less engaging, but more substantive, content. This is the sense in which I partly blame her for the culture changes in these communities. 

  2. ^

    My best guess is that she created this content. It is hard to tell for sure, because she does not always provide attribution. More on this later.

  3. ^

    Alternate explanation time: Maybe Kat Woods is so engagement brained that she did this on purpose, expecting people to call her out angrily in the comments, which in turn boosts engagement? Or maybe Kat Woods got the creator’s permission, but didn’t disclose this, again to boost engagement? Or maybe Kat Woods is the creator, and she’s using an AI voice? I don’t know and I don’t care. The point is, even if no actual harm was done, the perception of harm to a small creator, especially recently, is not a good look.

  4. ^

    It’s like when high schooler nerds make memes about college math and how “Baby Rudin” is the most hardest math book they’ll ever have to slave through, and they’re funny for the high schooler nerds who don’t know any better, but once you actually take college math, the jokes become trite, and “Baby Rudin” is just like any other math book.

4 comments

Comments sorted by top scores.

comment by Thane Ruthenis · 2025-01-15T23:27:17.401Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

At a glance, this seems like a high-risk high-reward tactic. I approve of this if this is in fact effective at changing people's minds, and disapprove of this if this is in fact making people cringe and become biased against the ideas she's trying to spread.

My immediate impression was that it's mostly the latter. I agree that these memes seem kind of cringe, especially if they're being spread in communities that are hostile to AI Safety takes and dislike this kind of content (which my cursory familiarity with r/singularity suggests)...

... but glancing at the karma ratings her posts receive, it doesn't seem that she's speaking to a hostile audience using takes that don't land with them. I think most of her posts have at least an average karma rating for a given community, some of them are big hits, and the comments are frequently skeptical but rarely outright derisive. This isn't a major indicator and I've only spent ~5 minutes looking through them, but it does look like it's working.

@KatWoods [LW · GW], do you have any more convincing metrics you're using to evaluate the efficiency of your, ah, propaganda campaign? Genuinely interested in how effective it is.

Replies from: just_browsing
↑ comment by just_browsing · 2025-01-16T00:05:52.384Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Well put and I agree.

Karma is tricky as a measure because subreddits are non-stationary. In particular, I feel like the "vibes" of all the subreddits I listed were different 6+ months ago, and they are becoming more homogenous (in part due to power users such as Kat Woods). I don't know of a way to view what the "hot" page of any given subreddit would have looked like at some previous point in time, so it's hard to find data to understand subreddit culture drift. Anyway, the high karma is also consistent with selection effects, where the users who do not like this content bounce off, and only the users that do stick around those subreddits in the long term. 

comment by Zane · 2025-01-15T22:36:55.171Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Some of the memes you referenced do seem "cringe" to me, but people have different senses of humor. I'm not sure what the issue is with someone posting memes they personally find funny.

If you disagree with the point that the memes are making, that's different, but can you give an example of something in one of the memes she posted that you thought was invalid reasoning? You called her content "dark arts tactics" and said:

"It feels like it is trying to convince me of something rather than make me smarter about something. It feels like it is trying to convey feelings at me rather than facts."

but you've only explained how it's making you feel instead of what message it's conveying.

Replies from: just_browsing
↑ comment by just_browsing · 2025-01-15T23:59:29.661Z · LW(p) · GW(p)

Typically I agree with the underlying facts behind her memes! For example I also think AI safety is a pressing issue. If her memes were funny I would instead be writing a post about how awesome it is that Kat Woods is everywhere. My main objection is that I do not like the packaging of the ideas she is spreading. For example the memes are not funny. (See the outline of this post: content, vibes, conduct.) 

You asked for an example of Kat Woods content that aims to convince rather than educate. Here is one recent example. I feel like the packaging of this meme conveys: "all of the objections you might have to the idea of X-risk via AI can actually be easily be debunked, therefore you would be stupid to not believe X-risk via AI". 

In reality, questions regarding likelihood of x-risk via AI are really tricky. Many thoughtful people have thought about these problems at great length and declared them to be hard and full of uncertainty. I feel like this meme doesn't convey this at all. Therefore, I'm not sure whether it is good for peoples' brains to consume this content. I will certainly say it's not good for my brain to consume this content.