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Time of India
07-07-2025
- Science
- Time of India
The Sith of Silicon Valley: Ziz LaSota's AI cult left six dead – who is she?
Once upon a time in the cold expanse of Alaska, a homeschooled child stared at the aurora borealis and wondered if the world was real. Years later, that same child – taller than most men, cloaked in black, calling herself Ziz – would terrify Silicon Valley's Rationalists, faking her own death, wielding a samurai sword, and leaving six bodies in her wake. This is the tale of Ziz LaSota, the transgender AI doomsday cultist who believed humanity would perish under artificial intelligence – unless she saved it first. Born under northern lights, reborn in the shadow of AI Ziz LaSota's early life was unremarkable: eldest of three, father a university instructor, homeschooled through lonely Alaskan winters. But teenage depression twisted her mind inward. Puberty felt like death. She wrote that she was 'horrified at being overwritten by a new self.' Logic became her religion. LessWrong and the Rationalist forums her sacred texts. At the University of Alaska, she read of 'x-risk' – existential risk – and decided AI was the harbinger of humanity's doom. She dropped out of graduate school and arrived in the Bay Area in 2016, ready to 'save the world.' But Silicon Valley is a cruel temple for prophets. She was just another zealot in a city full of them. The Sith emerges She became Ziz: more than six feet tall, blond curls tumbling past her black cape, declaring her faith in the Sith – the dark side order of Star Wars. She called Rationalists 'master Jedi.' The community tolerated her eccentricities. After all, they believed AI could destroy us all. Peter Thiel, Sam Altman, Sam Bankman-Fried – they had all passed through the Rationalist forge. But Ziz took it further. Her blog listed categories of people to be 'airlocked.' She advocated radical veganism, sleep deprivation rituals, and violent moral tests. She recruited a cadre of mostly transgender and nonbinary tech aspirants from Google, Oracle, NASA – they called themselves the Zizians. To them, Ziz was the messiah AI safety had awaited. From cult to killing field The timeline of blood is as absurd as it is tragic. 2019: Zizians don Guy Fawkes masks and robes to disrupt a Rationalist event in California. No guns were found, but SWAT stormed the venue. Arrests followed. Their chanting was described by police as 'speaking in tongues.' 2020: In Vallejo, California, landlord Curtis Lind was stabbed with knives and a samurai sword after demanding unpaid rent. He shot two Zizians in self-defence. One died. Ziz faked her death by falling off a boat, her obituary running in Alaska newspapers. 2023: The parents of Michelle Zajko, a close Zizian, were found shot dead in Pennsylvania. Bullets matched Zajko's gun, but evidence fell short. Ziz was arrested with them in a hotel, bailed out, and disappeared again. 2025: Lind was stabbed to death before he could testify against the group. Days later, in Vermont, two Zizians fired at Border Patrol agents. One agent and one Zizian died in the shootout. The philosophy that eats itself Rationalism always prided itself on logic untainted by emotion. But Ziz turned logic into madness. Roko's Basilisk, the infamous AI thought experiment predicting torture for those who don't create AI, haunted her. She believed any attempt to stop AI would condemn her to eternal torture by future malevolent superintelligences. Her solution: don't back down, escalate, airlock the doubters. Eliezer Yudkowsky, the Rationalist guru who warned of AI extinction, called Ziz's descent 'sad,' writing that weirdness attracted weirder people, some of whom turned out to be 'genuinely crazy and in a contagious way among the susceptible.' The Rationalist reckoning Today, Ziz sits in a Maryland jail, awaiting trial on gun, drug, and obstruction charges. She is not accused of wielding the murder weapons herself, but prosecutors say she orchestrated the violence. The Rationalist community is left with a bitter aftertaste. Was Ziz simply an unwell woman who found justification in AI apocalypse theory, or did Rationalism's own doomsday fetish birth her? Zvi Mowshowitz, a Rationalist blogger, asked if Ziz would have simply created another cult if AI philosophy hadn't ensnared her. 'The odds are, like, 55 percent,' he guessed. But perhaps the final lesson is simpler, as one Rationalist writer put it: even if the world is ending in five years, you cannot live like it is. That way lies madness, murder, and a black-caped prophetess clutching a samurai sword under flickering fluorescent lights.
New York Times
06-07-2025
- Politics
- New York Times
She Wanted to Save the World From A.I. Then the Killings Started.
If she didn't get access to vegan food, she might die. That's what Ziz LaSota told a judge in February when she appeared via videoconference in Allegany County District Court in Maryland for her bail hearing. Ziz, who is known widely by her first name, spoke haltingly in a weak voice, but interrupted the judge repeatedly. 'I might starve to death if you do not intervene,' she said, asking to be released on bail. 'It's more important than whatever this hearing is.' On its face, it seemed like a reasonable request. But prosecutors saw a ploy. They argued that Ziz, 34, was not just any inmate but the leader of an extremist group tied to a series of murders across the country. (The official charges against her involved trespassing, resisting arrest and a handful of misdemeanor gun charges.) She had skipped bail once before while being held in connection with a murder in Pennsylvania. Before that, she had faked her death to 'escape investigation' in a different case, according to the Maryland district attorney. Besides, according to Capt. Daniel Lasher, assistant administrator of the Allegany County Detention Center, Ziz had been served vegan meals 'from the get-go.' The judge denied her bail request. Ziz had been a minor celebrity within a slice of the Bay Area tech scene known as the Rationalists — a highly cerebral, extremely online group of tech and philosophy nerds dedicated to improving the world through logical thinking and deeply concerned with whether artificial intelligence will overtake the world and destroy humanity. Over the years, the Rationalist movement has counted Peter Thiel and Sam Bankman-Fried among its community, and has influenced numerous figures, including Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Steven Pinker and Nate Silver. Perhaps more significant, for the tech workers building the A.I. tools that will undergird our world, Rationalism is something like a fraternity, and a shared language. Ziz, who is transgender, started as a typical Rationalist — a geeky optimist hoping to save the world — but turned toward an ultraradical strain of the philosophy. She wrote favorably of violence, said she was willing to sacrifice everything to achieve her goals and considered A.I.'s threat to humanity 'the most important problem in the world,' she once wrote. Now six people are dead, landing her and several friends and allies, known as the 'Zizians,' in jail, awaiting trial. Many Rationalists worry that their community will be tinged by association with a group that, while not convicted of anything, has been compared in the press to the Manson family. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
