Shiloh Hill isn’t just trying to figure out how to survive WWE NXT — he literally went to Stanford to study how humanity might survive artificial intelligence.
The WWE NXT star opened up about his unusual academic background during an appearance on Busted Open After Dark with Bully Ray, revealing that the focus of his Stanford master’s program involved mitigating the environmental and existential dangers of AI. That means Hill went from studying how to keep machines from potentially wiping out mankind to getting punched in the face for a living.
Hill has already taken one pretty wild career turn. Ringside News previously covered how the WWE LFG winner walked away from a software development job at Tesla to pursue professional wrestling, while his victory on WWE LFG Season 2 eventually secured him an NXT contract. When Bully asked whether Hill had essentially left his master’s degree behind to concentrate on wrestling, Hill explained that the subject is still a major interest in his life.
“Yeah, yeah. No, I, I, I love pro Wrestling. I wanna wrestle as long as I can. Funny enough. So the specific, um, like focus of my master’s program was mitigating the environmental and existential threats of artificial intelligence.”
Hill then broke down exactly what that meant, and part of the goal sounds like something straight out of a science-fiction movie.
“It’s basically one, how do we stop AI from using so much like water and energy in terms of computation, but then two, how do we keep it once it gets really smart from being like able to wipe us out like the Terminator? So that’s something that I still do focus a lot on, on my social media.”
Hill isn’t keeping that part of his life completely separate from wrestling either. The NXT star admitted he’s already thought about eventually bringing artificial intelligence into his wrestling presentation because of how strongly people react to the subject.
“And, um, I’ve always thought there’d be, there’d be something where it could be a cool thing to incorporate into Wrestling somehow. I don’t know how yet, but, um, AI is definitely something that’s, uh, a fright, a powerful thing and a frightening thing. So in some way, if it could be incorporated into Wrestling, I think it would be a character that people would, um, definitely have emotion attached to, because people are really, it’s a, it’s a hot topic right now.”
It’s not exactly shocking that Hill is thinking outside the box. His unusual personality has already become part of his NXT presentation, with WWE previously leaning into his dark-web-inspired character after he made the jump from LFG to NXT television.
Hill may have traded Stanford classrooms and a Tesla desk job for WWE rings, but he clearly hasn’t abandoned the stuff that got his brain firing before wrestling. If he actually finds a way to turn AI, existential threats and Terminator-level paranoia into a WWE character, NXT could end up with one of the weirdest gimmicks on television — and with Shiloh Hill, that almost feels appropriate.
Would you like to see Shiloh Hill incorporate his AI background into his WWE character, or should he keep that part of his life separate from wrestling? Let us know what you think in the comments below.
This transcript was produced exclusively for Ringside News from the original recording. Republishing the transcription in full is prohibited. When using excerpts, provide prominent credit and a link to this article.
