The AI Doom Scale, 1 to 10.
Every story on AIpocalypse Now gets a single integer score from 1 to 10. The number is the AI Doom Scale. It is bucketed into four bands and computed by the AIpocalypse Risk-Weighting Framework. A score of 1 is background noise. A score of 10 is the kind of news that makes you reconsider your backup plans.
Tier by tier
Boring at any cost. The story exists. The implications do not.
Examples A new AI tutorial site · Another no-code wrapper · Beige product update
Worth reading once. Forget it by lunch.
Examples Minor capability bump · Niche academic paper · Local-government AI memo
A weather change, not a storm.
Examples Open-source model release · Funding announcement · Conference policy speech
Pattern starting. Could go either way.
Examples Industry layoffs tied to AI · Regulatory rumblings · New deployment in sensitive context
Active risk surface. Mitigations vague.
Examples Misuse incident · Model jailbreak in the wild · Defence contract
Mitigations exist but are not deployed.
Examples Capability eval failure · Major content-policy bypass · Lab departure with statement
Real harm at scale, hard to unwind.
Examples Election-grade deepfake operation · Autonomous weapon test · Verified safety-team disbanding
Spillover into infrastructure, finance, or governance.
Examples Coordinated AI-driven market shock · Critical-system compromise · Mass-firing wave
Recovery becomes a multi-year question.
Examples Loss of control over deployed agent · Compounding misuse with state actor · Documented intent to cause mass harm
The kind of news that makes you reconsider your backup plans.
Examples Reproducible loss-of-alignment incident · Critical-infrastructure cascade · Verified extinction-class capability
How the score is computed
Each story is rated on four dimensions, then combined. The dimensions are: existential criticality (does this involve irreversible systemic failure), probability vectoring (theoretical or active proof of concept), timeline imminence (how close to current deployment), and mitigation gap (is there a known fix). The full math lives on the methodology page.
The same rubric is applied to every story, every day. The doom score is a model opinion held consistently, not a truth claim about the future. Use it the way you would use a Richter scale reading. A 7 is bigger than a 5, but neither tells you exactly what your day looks like.