YouTube video (Scott Adams) arguing that current persuasion about the U.S. fentanyl crisis fails because statistics and graphs lack visceral impact. Adams proposes using AI to generate and publish daily photorealistic images of large piles of corpses (labeled as fentanyl victims) to force political action, and briefly suggests a partisan framing attacking Mexican cartels. The proposal is acknowledged as radical and potentially backfiring.
Chapters
All right, here's the problem with fentanyl persuasion so far. Here's me doing a bad job of persuading you that you need to do something about fentanyl, okay? Blah, blah, blah, statistics. Blah, blah, blah, Big alarming number, blah, blah, blah, worse than some wars. Blah, blah, blah, coming from Mexico. Blah, blah, blah, comes from China. Now that gets you right off the couch, doesn't it? Statistics. Or how about I show you a graph? Here's my graph. Look at that line. That line was going like this, but now it's going like this. It's a line. Beware of my line on my graph. Run away. There's a line on the graph. Nothing. Here's how you deal with the problem. You get your AI, which can now make artistic renderings of anything. And you program an AI to create a new visual piece of art every day. And you tell it to make a photorealistic, not an artistic version, but like a photorealistic, like it was a photograph picture of a pile of 300 dead Americans. Like a different pile of corpses. And you do a different pile every day. You just tweet it and you say, here are the people killed by fentanyl today. Today, 300. Because if you hear onesies and twosies, and you know my stepson died, and you know your brother's cousin died, it's horrible on a small level, but it doesn't make you act. Do you know why the Holocaust is such a persuasive part of our being? It's because of the visuals. It's the visuals. Do you know what the other so called Holocaust don't have going for them? Pictures. Pictures. You know, we always hear about the, like Armenian. Wasn't there some Armenian Holocaust? Right. I've never seen a picture. I've heard statistics and they're alarming, right? But if you don't have the pictures, you're not scaring people. So let's use AI to create literally a pile of corpses every day. Tweet it out. I'll retweet it. I'll retweet it every day. And we will make it a big enough problem so that the United States decides it's something to do about it. And by the way, if I were Republican, I would say I would attack the cartels in Mexico and I would make the Democrats argue that that's a bad idea because I don't think they can. The trouble is it would lure them into your frame. They don't want to be there. And I don't, you know, this could backfire because it's pretty radical.
