This post is going out early as a thank-you to paid subscribers. The full piece opens up to free subscribers next Tuesday. I’m grateful you’re here, and grateful for your commitment to rethinking what education can be. Your support is what keeps this work going.
Strap in for today’s post, because this is going to be an unusual one.
LARP stands for Live Action Role-Play. In its original sense, it describes people who spend a weekend in a forest clearing wearing homemade armor, speaking in character and following an agreed set of rules about who gets to hit whom with a foam sword. It is a hobby, and a fairly wholesome one. But somewhere along the way the internet borrowed the word and turned it into a running joke. To LARP online now often means doing an unconvincing impression of someone richer or more competent than you actually are.
AI LARPing is when people pretend their AI agent setup does far more than it really does, usually in a short video on TikTok or Instagram Reels. The typical clip opens on a dark-mode dashboard glowing in emerald and cyan. A synthetic voice with the confidence of a movie trailer announces that a new agent has just replaced an entire marketing department, and then a cursor starts racing across the screen faster than any human hand could move it.
Some of these dashboards come with gauges that pulse in time with the background music, labeled with things like “Neural Synapse Rate” or “Cognitive Bandwidth.” I have no idea what a neural synapse rate would measure in a piece of software, and I suspect the people who built the gauge don’t either. The whole composition only exists to stop your thumb from scrolling within the first three seconds.
Eric Morrison’s YouTube channel is an excellent source if you want to see what that looks like in real life.
There is a reason the genre looks like this. Real AI agents, the kind that plan several steps and call other software along the way, mostly run as background processes. They live in terminal windows full of log messages, and a terminal window full of log messages makes for terrible short-form video. So creators build what the feed rewards instead, which is a front end with no back end, animated to look like functional software with nothing running behind it.
The people making these videos want different things from them. Some are satirists, including developers and comedians who borrow the look of AI hype in order to mock it. Others are designers posting concept work that gets mistaken, sometimes conveniently, for a finished product. And then there are the grifters, for whom the glowing dashboard is the top of a sales funnel.
Most of the performers are individuals with a ring light and a screen recorder, and a few of the funniest are LARPing on purpose to make a point. So today, I want to take a short tour through some of the most ridiculous cases I could find, from an AI recruiter who was very impressed by a candidate’s raccoon protocols to a social network for AI agents where many of the agents turned out to be people.
