Max Headroom is an interesting artifact of the 1980s — an actual person impersonating an AI. The Max Headroom Signal Hijacking Incident (a Wow! signal geared to the modern era) abstracted the artifice one step further — a person impersonating a person impersonating an AI.

While refereeing a recent paper submitted by the o3 LLM for publication at oklo.org, I get this unmistakable Max Headroom feeling as I suggest wording changes and point out hallucinations in the reference list. I’m a human impersonating an AI agent in a self-referential improvement loop. How very 2025.