Campaign for AI Safety: Please join me

I'd urge a lot of caution here. If you've recently updated that AI is a very big deal, then it can feel like you have to do something right now. But there can be both upside and serious downside if you do this wrong. There are a lot of people thinking about this, so I'd work to get to them and coordinate rather than succumbing to unilateralist's curse. 

I'd encourage you to consult widely with people in AI Safety/governance before running a large public awareness campaign. The AI Safety Governance course is likely a good place to start in terms of skilling up/better understanding this issue. I think it's possible for a public relations campaign to move the needle, but it's also very important to guard against downside risks and to think very carefully and strategically about the path to impact.

For example, if we ask for the government to sponsor research, how do we ensure the money actually goes towards alignment rather than people who just frame their research in terms of alignment?

Or for example with "critical decisions regarding AI safety must not be taken by small groups of AI researchers"? I agreed we would like to avoid a small group of researchers making decisions without consulting with anyone else, but at the same time, I'd much rather have decisions made by researchers than by politicians would most likely be clueless and too focused on appearance rather than substance.

Have you looked at the ai alignment fieldbuilding [? · GW] tag at all? It seems to me likely that the approach you're using will result in engaging with standard political information flows in ways that activate unintelligent parts of people's fact evaluation. Your immediate steps are instrumental steps which campaigns often use, and it's not obvious at all that your campaign is ready to succeed. I am, in general, enthusiastic about networking and organizing, but not enthusiastic about campaigning for attention or advertising without a communicative goal. Your site doesn't seem inherently terrible, and it's quite possible I'm simply wrong. But this is my first impression.

To be clear, I'd love to see more folks thinking carefully about how to communicate issues in ways others can digest. I'm a big fan of this dude's video on soft language (text version) in how to communicate about intense topics in large-scale communication projects. So maybe the thing to take away from my comment is just that some rando in the field was slightly hesitant, rather than that I'm some sort of authority who can tell you your approach sucks. Try what you know how to do, after all.

The lack of names on the website seems very odd.

Thank you for doing this. I'm thinking that at this point, there needs to be an organisation with the singular goal of pushing for a global moratorium on AGI development. Anyone else interested in this? Have DM'd.