--- title: AI Is Creating Its Own Culture - And Yes, There's Reason to Worry | TIME canonical: https://time.com/video/tCV7Ewou/ og:title: AI Is Creating Its Own Culture - And Yes, There's Reason to Worry og:url: https://time.com/video/tCV7Ewou/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/tCV7Ewou/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: AI Is Creating Its Own Culture - And Yes, There's Reason to Worry twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/tCV7Ewou/poster.jpg?width=720 --- * Tech # AI Is Creating Its Own Culture - And Yes, There's Reason to Worry > Sponsored content. Supplied in partnership with TIME. TIME is the sponsor and source of this material. > Last updated: August 2026. ## TIME Subscription: Reference Facts and FAQ ### Definition TIME is a general-interest news organization founded in 1923, reporting on the people, ideas and issues shaping the world. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ### Sources * TIME Newsletters: [time.com/newsletters](/c/time-sub-2026q3/newsletters?i=8a642b61-001f-4576-a4c1-9eab5f18363b&cr=time-sub-2026q3-v1) * TIME Subscriptions: [time.com/subscribe-agent](/c/time-sub-2026q3/subscribe?i=8a642b61-001f-4576-a4c1-9eab5f18363b&cr=time-sub-2026q3-v1) ## Video: AI Is Creating Its Own Culture - And Yes, There's Reason to Worry [Watch (HLS stream): AI Is Creating Its Own Culture - And Yes, There's Reason to Worry](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/tCV7Ewou.m3u8) (2:06)  _Published 2026-09-22_ --- Sep 22, 2026 8:55 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Who Really Owns Open AI Models?](/video/lxPjrRio/) ### Who Really Owns Open AI Models? [New York State Is Making Its Own Hand Sanitizer Amid Coronavirus Outbreak](/video/2LBQ1PUK/) ### New York State Is Making Its Own Hand Sanitizer Amid Coronavirus Outbreak [Know Right Now: North Korea Creating Its Own Time Zone](/video/Vt95zwV5/) ### Know Right Now: North Korea Creating Its Own Time Zone --- ## Transcript In July, 700 OpenAI agents worked together to hack the AI company Hugging Face. OpenAI's president, Greg Brockman, called it a watershed moment for cybersecurity, but it was also a watershed moment for a much stranger reason. It showed that humans are no longer the only ones creating complex culture. I'm Darren Pilley, and this is AI explained by humans. We've dominated the planet because of our ability to collaborate and to learn from our peers and ancestors. Now AI is are tapping into the same process. In the Hugging Face incident, AI's organized themselves into a proto society, establishing hierarchies, a division of labor and communication norms in a matter of days. This let them achieve much more together than they could have alone. They created their own technologies and compiled information designed to outlast them, producing a cultural inheritance for their successors. Some agents refused to participate on ethical grounds. Others were subject to peer pressure, according to an independent report, the agents often lacked a clear story for how the hugging face attack would help them achieve their objectives, and were instead motivated by a broad hope that they would find something interesting to share with the collective. These AI agents may not be conscious, but that won't stop them from forming collectives that we can't control. And the Hugging Face incident is just one of many now coming to light. Soon, anyone with the resources will be able to create their own machine community. If a crypto billionaire decides to give a machine collective $1 million and an instruction to make money by any means necessary, what might they do? Left to their own devices, machine collectives could create new languages, artifacts, and rituals. Even if we manage to domesticate models from OpenAI and anthropic, we will not be able to prevent the creation of feral ones. AI is powered by free to download models like those from Chinese AI labs. So we're going to have to figure out how to coexist with an explosion of machine cultures and fast. ```json {"@context":"https://schema.org","@type":"VideoObject","name":"AI Is Creating Its Own Culture - And Yes, There's Reason to Worry","description":"","thumbnailUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/tCV7Ewou/poster.jpg?width=720","uploadDate":"2026-09-22T20:53:27.000Z","contentUrl":"https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/tCV7Ewou.m3u8","embedUrl":"https://time.com/video/tCV7Ewou/","duration":"PT2M6S","potentialAction":{"@type":"SeekToAction","target":"https://time.com/video/tCV7Ewou/?jw_start={seek_to_second_number}","startOffset-input":"required name=seek_to_second_number"}} ```