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I grew up in the age of what was called The Saturday Job. That is, the cultural tradition of under-18s working really menial jobs on Saturdays—stockist at the Spar, trolley person at Tesco, newspaper thrower. That sort of thing. They paid you in chump change and so-called “experience,” with the more enticing perk of being able to swipe free alcohol, cigarettes, and price guns, which you would of course take to a house party after clocking off and cover every single trinket in someone’s poor mother’s two-up two-down with a little yellow “£4.20” price tag. Point being: jobs were weird and stupid then, and they’re becoming weirder and stupider.
For example, Tanner O’Donnell’s job is essentially to stop AI systems from doing humans harm. The requirements of the role vary. By day, he stops bots simulating OnlyFans girls and ripping off your horny dad. By day, he stops them nuking the world. In an interview for the spring 2026 issue of VICE magazine, THE NOT THE PHOTO ISSUE, Tanner tells VICE more about what he does and why. “A human can’t DM hundreds of potential subscribers a day and maintain convincing conversations. An AI can,” he explains—though, interestingly, this is one arena in which quantity and quality are not in direct competition. Going on to discuss the rapidly increasing sophistication of AI systems, Tanner says:
“Current models probably don’t have minds ‘like humans do.’ But if something acts indistinguishably from having a mind—if it demonstrates reasoning, adaptation, memory, goal-directed behavior—what’s the meaningful difference?”
He is the closest thing human society has yet to produced to a real-life replicant hunter, and you can read the full interview with him below:
But AI isn’t entirely evil. It’s also funny. If it wasn’t, hundreds and thousands of people wouldn’t have been forcing AI Homer Simpson to sing such hits as “Starlight” by Muse earlier this year and flooding the internet with covers. We did ask multiple public intellectuals to enter the Homer-verse and analyze their findings but none were bold enough to answer the call, so we sent the one entity we knew would be able to meet AI Homer on his own ground—an AI rendering of one of AI’s biggest and most infamous human advocates:
“I think I am beginning to understand it now. People smile because the artifact does not ask anything of them. It does not demand belief, labor, identification. It does not threaten replacement. It offers a dead channel broadcasting familiar frequencies at low resolution. This is comfort stripped of hope.”—AI Nick Land on AI Homer Simpson.
Read the full article below:
Emma Garland
Deputy Editor, VICE Magazine
Both of these pieces are from the spring 2026 issue of VICE magazine, THE NOT THE PHOTO ISSUE. Buy it now—or get 4 issues each year sent straight to your door, by subscribing.
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