Stop Chasing Views: How to Reduce x-Risk as an AI Safety Content Creator

Many of the content creator fellows at plzdontkillus found my thoughts useful when I visited two weeks ago, so I’m now sharing a write-up here.

Many thanks to Maggie Munroe (FLI) and Chana Messinger (80,000 Hours) for their feedback on an earlier draft. Cross-posted to EA Forum.

As an x-risk content creator, your job is to increase the number of good actions that your viewers take and to increase the goodness of those actions.

Here's how to think about impact, your types of viewers, what calls to action to make, how to talk about x-risk, and what to do if you have an existing following.

Impact

As a content creator, your impact is indirect. Your impact lies in the impact that your viewers have that they wouldn't have had without you. Whatever your viewers do because of you that they wouldn't have otherwise done, that is your impact. Your job is to increase the number of good actions that your viewers take and to increase the goodness of each of those actions. You can model this as

Your Impact = Number of Views x Impact per View,

And the amount of impact that each view has can be seen as: Does it get the person to take action, and how good are those actions at reducing existential risk?

Actions can be pretty broad. For example, people might talk to others about AI Safety, change their voting behavior, donate money, or switch careers. In order for them to change such behaviors because of you, you will first need to change their mind. E.g. their beliefs and attitudes. This is necessary but not sufficient for behavior change. They can be as worried as you want about the future of humanity, but if they don’t change any behavior, then they haven’t reduced x-risk. And if they haven’t reduced x-risk, then you haven’t reduced x-risk either.

So while there are various ways for you to be impactful as a content creator, it will always have to end with people taking good actions because of you, and probably often involve you changing their views about AI in the process.

Two Types of Viewers

There are 2 types of people your videos might reach.

The first type includes those with the potential to switch careers and pursue a full-time career in AI safety. This applies to many people, but it depends on their skills and life circumstances, and it helps to have a technical background. However, as many of you are showing, a technical background is not needed to have a full-time impact on AI safety.

The second type includes people who, for whatever reason, are not in a position to pursue a full-time career in AI safety. These people might contribute in other ways. For example:

Part-time or voluntary work in AI safety.

Donating to the AI safety community.

Content creation with a focus on AI safety.

Personal outreach and conversations with friends (real life, whatsapp, texting, etc)

Political engagement (voting, writing to politicians, signing public letters, attending protests).

By and large, these part-time contributions types are communication, advocacy, and donations. I might be missing stuff, though!

Three Types of Calls to Action

There are 3 types of things you can want from your viewers:

You could want them to just be informed with no specific call to action. The theory of change here is that at some point in the future, they will have some important thing that matters, and they might, for example, be more likely to vote for a political candidate that is favorable to AI safety, or they might be more likely to go to a protest about AI safety in the future. But you do not ask this of them, and potentially never will. Or even if you might in the future, for now you're just focused on building an AI safety-aware following. This style can be nice because people often react negatively to feeling like they're being sold something.

You could have direct-impact calls to action to your viewers, such as "Sign this public letter," "Donate to this organization," or "Go to this specific protest." You can find a list of calls to action for different audiences here: betterpath.ai/what-you-can-do. There exist other lists from various other organizations too.

You could have a call to action towards the funnel of AI safety. You could send people off asking them to look at or sign up to Lens Academy or Blue Dot Impact. I find this model exciting because it means as a content creator, you only need to get your viewer interested enough to go to a website, and then it's that platform’s job to get them excited enough to engage more and more, and then get them to take a full 25-hour course, which is what really makes them ready to have a big contribution. I’d recommend this CTA for both people with full-time career potential and those with part-time contribution potential. Compared to the second category (direct-impact CTAs), I’d argue that those simple actions, like signing letters and donating, are more likely to consistently happen after people have deeply engaged with AI Safety for 25h, so even if those actions are the goal, an introductory course seems like a good starting point.

Three Approaches to Raising Concern About Existential Risk

I can see 3 ways to get people to worry about existential risk from advanced AI:

Go straight for the goal, talking about x-risk. This is what books like "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" and releases like AI2027 do. This is also what some AI safety videos from e.g. AI in Context and Drew Spartz's Species do. They will start and end the video talking about extinction risk.

Hook into people’s existing worries about AI, then move towards x-risk. Questionnaires show that people do not really start out caring about human extinction. They care about things like misinformation, deepfakes, job loss, scams, manipulation, and to some extent, power concentration or authoritarianism. What you can do is hook into these things and then try to get them to switch to more existential risks from that point on.

Talk about a different topic, attract a following with that, and occasionally mention AI safety. This seems potentially useful in that it can create wide societal support for AI safety, where it is associated not with a single political system or a single type of person, but is a worry that is broadly spread throughout the world. This might not work with many audiences, because usually it seems good to focus on one specific niche, but if your audience follows you for e.g. intellectual commentary about the world, I suspect this might work.

Moving from everyday AI worries to x-risk

If you go for option 2, where you meet people where they're at and focus on existing worries before you start talking about existential risk, it's important to think about how you're gonna move them from that starting point to where you want them to be. Some people think just spending attention on that starting point might be enough to have a positive impact and reduce existential risk. I'm not particularly convinced by that. I think you need to find actual ways to get people to care about existential risk and then get them to take actions about existential risk. Again, if people do not change their behaviors, they can’t reduce existential risk.

I can see a couple of ways to approach this, and I'm not sure which ones work well:

Within a video, you can start from something that people already care about, like job loss, and make that transition to existential risk within a few minutes. Some people seem good at doing this, and it seems worth experimenting with.

You can do some videos on easy-to-understand, everyday worries that are more introductory topics, and some videos on existential risk. Whether this works well, I have no idea, but it seems not harmful to experiment with. Mind you, you will likely get to see that your beginner-friendly videos get more views than the videos about existential risk. Do not take this as a bad sign. This is to be expected, and this does not mean that the beginner-friendly videos are doing a better job than your…