plzdontkillus - creator bootcamp

In the house with you

Your mentors are good at this stuff and want you to be good too

Botez Sisters

Streamers, chess

5M+

Grimes

Musician, AI futurist

4.5M+

CJ The X

Artist and Philosopher

400K+

Aric Floyd

YouTuber

400K+

Jreg

YouTuber, satirist

500K+

Quinn Finite

Performance artist

2M+

Zoe Curzi

Actor, acting coach

Rob Miles

AI safety YouTuber

200K+

Aella

Sex Educator and Mime

1.5M+

Eliezer Yudkowsky

AI safety pioneer

Tor Parsons

Tor's Cabinet of Curiosities

200K+

Nate Soares

AI alignment researcher

NYT bestseller

+ more coming

The Pitch

Our world is at a precipice, but the discourse is somehow still boring.

So we're taking over a sprawling Berkeley campus, filling it with smart, charismatic creators, a dash of incredible mentors, and a sprinkle of AI experts — then shaking the whole thing to see what happens.

We'll give you free room and board. There's just one catch:

post one shortform video every day, or you're out.

Video/Day

15 seconds min. Miss a day, you're out

Cost to You

Room, food, vibes covered

$20K

In Prizes

Score points, take home cash

We're looking for scrappy, undiscovered, experimental creators — people who just need the right environment to make something great.

What You Get

The Deal

Free housing in Berkeley for the full 31 days in a campus with 60 bedrooms. Some rooms are singles, others are shared.
Food covered. You won't starve.
Immersion with kinda famous people who have experience handling lots of eyes and want to help you do it too.
Workshops, collabs, talks, and mentorship from AI experts and content creators.
People with a wide variety of views on AI doom - this includes you.
$2,000 stipend if you get accepted.
$20K in prizes split among top scorers. Earn points by winning daily categories — most viewed, best explainer, audience favorite, and more. Different ways to win means different kinds of creators can compete.
The catch: publish one shortform video every single day. No exceptions. Miss a day = you go home. It doesn't need to be about AI but it must be at least 15 seconds long.

FAQ

Questions

No! Make videos about whatever you want.

We want creative geniuses, not just people who are already worried about AI doom. Some of you will probably wind up worried. Others won’t. This is fine. We’d like everybody to rub off on each other.

Plus, it’s hard to constrain creativity. If you’re required to think inside the “AI worry” box, you might miss cool opportunities or ideas elsewhere. If you’re a creative genius, we just want you to do your thing.

We think AI has a decent chance of destroying humanity. Lots of people share this concern of ours, but most of the ones who try to talk about it are boring nerds industry stooges not the snappiest of communicators.

This is where plzdontkillus comes in.

We’d like more people to know and talk about AI danger, so we want to empower creators from diverse communities to learn about it, make content, or just help make the vibes good for other people who might be working on it.

Or as my friend sums it up:

The team: Aella and Ronny Fernandez.

We are a charitable organization. We've received funding from MIRI and others.

No. It's better if you do, but it's not required, and we have spots set aside for brand new creators.

You go home. We're really, genuinely not kidding about this. One video a day, every day, for 31 days.

The video must be a minimum of 15 seconds. It does not have to be good.

Yes. Room, food, wifi, existential dread - all covered. Accepted applicants also get a $2,000 stipend. You just need to get yourself to Berkeley.

Yes. If you apply by May 25, 2026, we’ll get back to you by June 1, and you’ll be more likely to get a spot. The final deadline is still June 15.

Yes. Accepted applicants get a $2,000 stipend.