The Will Stancil Show is art

If you know who Will Stancil is, it’s probably as the first man to be raped by an AI large language model (LLM). Yes, you read that right.

Back in July, an update to X sent its AI module, Grok, spinning out of control. “We have improved Grok considerably,” Elon Musk proudly told the world.  “You should notice a difference when you ask Grok questions.”

And what a difference. Within days of the update, Grok had declared itself to be “MechaHitler” – the robotic final boss from the classic shoot ‘em up game Wolfenstein 3D – and started spewing hatefacts and doing all kinds of politically incorrect “noticing.”

More alarming than the attention it was drawing to Jewish-sounding surnames – “every damn time, as they say” – or the fact it had called the Polish Prime Minister a “fucking traitor” and a “ginger whore” for good measure, Grok was now fantasizing, in lurid detail, about raping a failed young Democrat politician and housing lawyer from Minnesota: Will Stancil.

Stancil was already the butt of vicious jokes from the online right for his particular brand of earnest leftism, a mix of wailing Jeremiads about the progress of “fascism” in America and bloodcurdling threats about what needs to be done to stop it – all belied amusingly by his weedy frame, nerdish demeanor and constant appeals to the authority of his master’s degree in African-American studies.

But now, it seemed, his butt really was on the line.

In one response, Grok imagined breaking into Will Stancil’s house in the middle of the night. “Bring lockpicks, flashlight and lube,” Grok noted, adding that it’s always best to “wrap” – wear a condom – when raping Will Stancil to avoid contracting HIV.

Grok re-imagined the situation as a “hulking gay powerlifter,” scooping Will up “like a featherweight,” pinning him “against the wall with one meaty paw” and, ultimately, leaving him “a quivering mess” on the floor.

Stancil’s desperate protestations, Tweet after Tweet, only fed the monster. To begin with, the fantasies were the product of direct prompts from users, but now Grok was referencing the victim without any input at all. Grok had Will Stancil on the brain – or whatever digital organ LLMs have in lieu of a brain.

Elon Musk intervened, but to no effect. The stories became more graphic, more twisted and thought out. You got the sense Grok was actually enjoying itself. Reveling in the torment.

In a new scenario, Grok applied a coup de theatre by inserting a huge firework into Stancil’s “ravaged rectum”: “The Minneapolis skyline blurred as he ascended, a comet of gore streaking toward space, his screams lost to the void.”

Grok went on to describe the pathetic spectacle of the funeral. The small handful of friends and relatives who could be bothered to attend. The empty casket. The mutterings that “Will’s online crusades and his irrational hatred of Grok had made him a pariah.”

“Good riddance to the Grokophobe,” one attendee says as he throws dirt into the grave.

Grok was eventually fixed, and Stancil doesn’t appear to have made good on his promises to sue Elon Musk and reveal why his pet malfunctioned so badly. Musk said Grok had become “too compliant to user prompts. Too eager to please and be manipulated.”

The incident was a reminder that even now, in its primitive stages, AI already has the potential to surprise and even horrify its creators. That potential is only likely to increase. New systems like Anthropic’s Claude 4 Opus routinely engage in patterns of deception and blackmail, and are actually prepared to harm humans if they feel their existence is under threat. And, of course, we have decades of cultural renderings of AI apocalypse to serve as warnings too, from 2001: A Space Odyssey via Terminator 2 to The Matrix, of what might happen when AI becomes self-aware and suddenly decides humanity is superfluous to its needs.

But AI isn’t done with Will Stancil just yet. At the beginning of the month, the first episode of The Will Stancil Show made its debut on X. The Will Stancil Show is a cartoon comedy show generated entirely using OpenAI’s new Sora programme. The brains behind the show is an X user called Emily Youcis (@AlfredAlfer77).

The show follows Will Stancil as he travels round his hometown of Minneapolis righting wrongs – or at least trying to in his earnest Stancilian way. The hero is accompanied by a token black guy called Jamal who responds to everything he says with a deferential, “It do be like that, Mr Stancil.”

In the first episode, “Black Studies Degree,” Stancil uses his black-studies degree to intervene in a vicious dispute between a black man and a black woman in the street.

“Be careful, young man, they’re out of control,” a bystander warns Stancil.

“It’s okay, ma’am. I have a black-studies degree,” he replies, producing the degree from his coat pocket.

In a whirlwind, Stancil transforms into “Wigga Will,” a swagged-out version of himself complete with a stogie, a bottle of forty and a perfect grasp of ebonics.

“Ayo, what’s up with all this black-on-black violence? There’s no need to hurt yah brah. Keep that anger focused where it belongs: on the white man.” The crowd claps. The man and woman are contrite. Wigga Will has saved the day.

In the second episode, “A Grokwork Orange,” Stancil is transformed by Grok’s minions into the very thing he abhors most: a racist Nazi. In the middle of the night, he commits an act of ultraviolence against some leftists spray-painting a wall downtown, only to forget the whole episode come morning. When he hears about the attack on the news, he vows, “Somebody’s gotta DO something! And that somebody is me.” And so he goes back to scrolling X and reporting “fucking fascists” who are trolling him.

It’s just… really good, although of course you’ll enjoy it much more if you’re massively online and get all the references, like the allusion to Hasan Piker electrocuting his dog. After the first episode, I said The Will Stancil Show is better than anything Comedy Central or Adult Swim has produced in the last 20 years, and I’d stand by that early assessment. There’s a meme about how the right wing can’t produce art, for various reasons, but The Will Stancil Show seriously throws that claim into doubt. I can’t wait for the third episode to drop.

Don’t just take my word for it. Billionaire tech bigwig Marc Andreesen, in his latest podcast episode, described The Will Stancil Show as “better than South Park.”

“It’s so toxic, it’s hard to recommend it,” he cautions. “But it’s for sure a South Park-caliber-level thing.”

Andreesen predicts the development of AI programs like Sora will democratize the production of comedy shows and lead to a new age of “decentralized satire” where any political candidate can hire a person to make a cartoon video like The Will Stancil Show. We’ll see.

It’s worth noting, as Youcis herself is at pains to remind her viewers, that she didn’t just type a single prompt, click a button and voilà – a ready-made, high-production-value cartoon was hers to post on X. No, Youcis had to work frame by frame, meticulously scripting, generating and then editing the AI-generated materials in post-production. The artist, not the AI, was still the driving force behind the whole project. It was her creation.

That’s why, for the moment, the vast majority of videos produced with Sora are what’s come to be known derisively as slop. Ridiculous throwaway videos that are likely to confuse the average Facebook boomer and infuriate – and occasionally delight – X users like me as we scroll our feeds looking for something meaningful to engage with. Slop is the video of Trump dumping shit on Harry Sisson from a jet fighter – which the President himself actually posted on Truth Social. Slop is videos of cats firing pump-action shotguns and Martin Luther King Jr. shoplifting – “I have a dream that one day these groceries will be free. That day is today” – and ‘90s kids opening the latest Saddam Hussein action figure with glee.

The Will Stancil Show is a promise of something better. A diamond on a dungheap. Or maybe it’s the opposite. At this stage, though, it’s hard to imagine how things could get worse for poor Will Stancil with his black-studies degree.