Tom Scott

Tom Scott (born 1984) spent a decade as one of YouTube’s most reliable institutions: a weekly explainer — red t-shirt, amazing place, tight script — covering linguistics, engineering, and the strange corners of the world, alongside the panel show Citation Needed and the podcast Lateral. He ended the weekly run in January 2024 after ten years without missing a week.

The email that became a warning

His most-discussed video arrived in February 2023. “I tried using AI. It scared me.” begins with a mundane task — fixing a Gmail labels quirk that had silently corrupted his email backups — and turns into an essay about technological upheaval. ChatGPT wrote the Google Apps Script fix in seconds, worked around Google’s own incorrect documentation, and left Scott with what he called a pit-of-the-stomach existential horror.

The video’s framework stuck: technologies follow a sigmoid curve, and nobody knows where on the curve AI sits. If near the top, it is just a new tool for programmers and artists. But Scott’s dread came from the possibility that ChatGPT is AI’s Napster moment — the first mass-adopted warning shot before an internet-scale transformation — with him, this time, on the incumbent’s side of the disruption. He was careful to hedge on AI art and copyright, but drew one firm line: no training on any specific person’s work without consent.

Scott is no reflexive doomer — the video credits ChatGPT’s genuine usefulness and even ends with a deliberately AI-written sponsor read as a punchline (“I am going to be out of a job sooner”). But as one of the web’s most trusted explainers telling millions that this technology frightened him, his video became a touchstone for AI anxiety — cited in the same breath as warnings from CGP Grey and Hank Green.