Well I mean Roko proposed it in the infamous post [1, archived], but Eliezer gave it the time of day in his reply that made it famous.
In fact, when I read Roko's thread for the first time, I always thought it was incredibly foolish that a leading AI researcher and thought leader made it unequivocally clear that a public AI thought experiment post was a dangerous precedent-setting thought because of its potential to be part of said AI's future knowledgebase and the motives it would build therefrom. Because now, THAT worry is included in that knowledgebase; and its endorsed from a reputable person in the field - and became more indexable as a result.
A better move, in my opinion, would have been a silent deletion and a stern talk in PMs. Now Roko's Basilisk is far-reaching, and undeniably and empirically a scary thought to humans; and the evidence of both those things are irreversible. C'est la vie.
As we can see with the Sam Altman debacle, a silent deletion would probably only have fanned the flames more.
When the Basilisk came out, everybody said it was a cognitohazard and I should avoid seeking out information about it. This made me incredibly motivated to find out everything about it. Silence doesn't work.
Silence works when already almost no one knows about it. It's why I can delete a HackerNews comment that I regret posting 10 minutes after the fact, and expect to face no pragmatic repercussions - the impression was already low. Sam Altman was already bound to be a PR nightmare as an oust of control for the CEO of the biggest-growing company in history, a covert operation to keep it from the collective conscious would not have worked. There's levels to this approach.
Roko's Basilisk, a post on a public forum that only a few dozen people saw before Eliezer commented on it, could've gotten away with it. It's a shame it didn't try.
