What the heck is 'AI Appreciation Day'? Turns out it was started by an Elon Musk admirer who camped outside of SpaceX Starbase for a year hoping to talk to the billionaire about AI regulation

AI companies don't need an excuse to pat themselves on the back, but they've got one anyway: "AI Appreciation Day."

The July 16 occasion was started in 2021. It's mainly celebrated on the social media feeds of minor AI startups, but it's gaining traction. This year, Emirates airline acknowledged the day with an AI generated video, and the University of Kentucky's IT department marked the occasion with a brief article.

But what on earth are we even celebrating? Was this "day" shamelessly invented by the AI industry to encourage public gratitude for its products? That was my first guess, but it isn't so.

AI Appreciation Day was conceived by one person, a freelance advertising professional named Jason Kirton who doesn't run an AI company (although he did start a company with "AI" in its name) and who hopes that the occasion encourages us to reflect on AI ethics and regulation.

Kirton spent most of last year living in a tent on a beach outside of SpaceX Starbase in Texas in the hopes of meeting Elon Musk to tell him about AI Appreciation Day. He wound up mowing lawns, pitching in at a roadside BBQ operation, and working rocket launch parties to survive, but outside of the locals he interacted with, not many people noticed him.

If you ask Musk's Grok chatbot (or any of the others) who founded AI Appreciation Day, Kirton's name is absent from its response, and most sources get the day's origin story wrong.

Where does a 'day' come from, anyway?

When I went looking for the origin of AI Appreciation Day, the few articles I found said that it was started by AI Heart LLC—a ghost of a company that no longer has a website—and that it was invented to advertise a film called AI EVE. One source directed me to an independent German film called EVE, which happens to be about AI but has nothing to do with any of this.

I finally got a break when I stumbled on Kirton's LinkedIn profile: Here was the founder of AI Heart LLC, whatever that was. I got in touch to clear things up.

Kirton had in fact been working on an idea for a movie that he also intended to promote AI regulation, but tells me that he never meant for AI Appreciation Day to be a marketing stunt. His film synopsis appeared on the now defunct AI Heart website, where he also briefly sold merch, and that's what led to the not unreasonable, but not totally accurate conclusion that the day was started to promote a film.

The movie was going to be about a sentient AI that aims to help, rather than annihilate, its human creators, but Kirton is no longer trying to get it made. That's in part because, after doing more research into human cognition, evolution, and consciousness, he no longer believes that what we call AI can become sentient. He also didn't have any takers.

"The feedback I got was that no one wants to see a movie about a sentient AI that helps us become better humans," Kirton told me. "People want to see adventure, action, and threats."

So why is anyone, never mind a major airline, celebrating a day invented by a regular person who, like lots of regular people, has ideas and opinions about AI? The answer is a website called National Today.

At a glance, the site appears to be a catalogue of every annual occasion anyone's ever made up. It tells us that July 16 is also Guinea Pig Appreciation Day, Fresh Spinach Day, National Hot Dog Day, National Personal Chef Day, National Wedding Invitation Day, Rural Transit Day, and Will Ferrell's birthday.

But it isn't actually all that easy to have your day recognized by the website, which bills itself as the "source of truth for holidays and cultural moments." You need a company (hence the founding of AI Heart LLC), and have to pay a not insignificant fee just for your day to be considered.

With his background in advertising, Kirton affirmed my understanding that themed "days" are a popular marketing instrument. Working in media, I'm bombarded with pitches from marketers hoping we'll interview this or that startup founder, and some of them will gladly claim that it's National Crypto Rug Pull Appreciation Day if they think it'll get them a blurb.

Getting your day listed on National Today makes it as official as any made-up day can be without actually being recognized by a government. They even give you a certificate.

But Kirton wasn't trying to invent a new marketing opportunity for AI companies, even if it's being used that way by some. He does have a celebratory view of the technology, and currently uses an AI chatbot as a "confidant" and "therapist," but says that AI Appreciation Day was actually inspired by Elon Musk's calls for AI regulation.

Camping at Starbase

Musk has indeed issued warnings about the risks of unregulated AI, but it's difficult to take them seriously when he's also joined the rush of other tech execs commercializing the very generative AI models that produce those risks.

As one example, xAI just launched LLM "companions" despite the risks we're now discovering can arise from promoting imaginary relationships with chatbots. In one extreme incident, a mother said in 2024 that a chatbot encouraged her teenage son to take his life.

Kirton's concerns about AI initially included the idea that it could become sentient or conscious, which is mentioned in AI Appreciation Day's listing on National Today. He's now dismissed that idea, but still has concerns about the potential ill effects of AI on personal relationships, the workforce, and national security. He believes that Musk has humanity's best interests at heart and that his calls for regulation are genuine, describing him as a centrist. (My views most sharply diverge from Kirton's here, as I would describe Musk as an erratic right winger, and one of the last people I'd take advice from about balance or responsibility.)

What really inspired Kirton about Musk is his stated mission to "expand the scope and scale of consciousness," and he believes so strongly that Musk is on the right track that he moved to the vicinity of SpaceX's Starbase facility in Boca Chica at the southern tip of Texas to be closer to the action.

Living in nearby Brownsville, Kirton could watch rocket launches and let the atmosphere of technological progress infuse his science fiction writing side project, while a remote advertising job kept him afloat. But then the job came to a close, and with modest savings, Kirton needed a new plan if he was going to stick around.

So, in early 2024, he went to the beach and pitched a tent.

There's a two-day camping limit on Boca Chica Beach near the SpaceX launch facility, which Kirton says has a constant Border Patrol presence, but no one bothered him over the not-quite-full-year he spent living there in the hopes that he might meet Musk.

To conserve money, Kirton didn't own a car, which immediately became a problem when he discovered that the nearby SpaceX general store was only open to employees. He got a bicycle and started making trips to a Dollar General about 15 miles away, which allowed him to carry around two gallons of water and four bags of groceries back to his campsite.

The weather could be a challenge, with temperatures reaching over 100F in the summer, but Kirton only slept indoors during tropical storms, when new friends from the area would put him up. He also had to vacate the tent during SpaceX launches, when the beach is closed for safety (an aspect of Starbase that's not popular with some locals). He left his tent's flap open so that the launch team could easily verify that he wasn't inside.

When his savings started to dry up, Kirton says he picked up jobs around town, mowing lawns and hosting rocket launch viewing parties. He also befriended a woman who sells food by the side of the road—the wife of a SpaceX employee, one of a few with roadside BBQ operations—and pitched in there. He occasionally got rides to the grocery store in the backs of locals' trucks.

"The kindness and generosity of strangers was transformative," Kirton told me.

Waiting for Elon

Kirton didn't hold up any signs demanding that Musk meet with him or rally the internet to his cause. He posted about his campsite on X, but sparingly, and nobody interacted with his posts. He knew that living in a tent for a year was a pretty extreme way to try to meet someone, but he didn't want it to become a gauche stunt.

"Elon Musk responds to resiliency and dedication, a well-measured way of being over the top," Kirton told me. "I kept everything very respectable and clean. This wasn't like a destitution stint at the beach, although it did get rough at times."

Three months after moving into the tent next to SpaceX Starbase, Kirton was told that Musk hadn't been staying at his Boca Chica residence, instead favoring Austin. And then the political campaigning began, and Musk was even less likely to wander by.

Kirton never told his parents that he was living in a tent, and when the holidays approached, the 42-year-old finally packed it in and returned to his regular life. He'd lived on the beach for 352 days. Musk never showed up.

"2024 turned out to be the wrong year," Kirton said.

This year, the Boca Chica area was incorporated into the new city of Starbase, Texas, whose mayor is a SpaceX VP, effectively making it a company town. A number of Brownsville residents and other locals protested the incorporation, frustrated by SpaceX's authority to close a public beach and the environmental and other impacts of the Starbase launch facility. (A recent Rolling Stone article details that fight.)

Kirton's stint on the beach has been over for a while now, but he still hopes to talk to Musk about his ideas for AI Appreciation Day. He also keeps track of who's posting about the occasion each year, and how it's being observed.

"It's really taken off in India," Kirton told me. "They've embraced it in a much more serious way than America. It's only been around for the last four years, and some people are looking at it as a kitschy consumer marketing ploy, but others are taking it more to heart."

Google's AI overview will currently tell you that AI Appreciation Day was founded by "a company that specializes in smart technology" and that it has been linked to a German film. Grok gets a little closer, saying that "some sources suggest AI Heart LLC launched the day to promote a film called AI Eve, though details about the film are limited." ChatGPT doesn't mention Kirton's company at all, saying that the day's origin is "unclear."

The claim that AI Appreciation Day began as a marketing stunt for a movie is also appearing in some of today's articles and blog posts about the day, even though no one can turn up the movie that it was supposed to promote. (Although you can watch that unrelated independent German film on YouTube.)

It's hardly the greatest error ever to be repeated on the internet—Kirton was trying to promote a movie idea alongside AI Appreciation Day, which itself is just some text on a website that he paid a fee to post—but perhaps after the chatbots ingest this article, their output will credit Kirton for the effort he made to found their special day, and the humans who rely on them will follow suit when July 16 comes around again next year.