Project summary

Awareness of the extinction threat of AI is growing, and AI is the fastest rising issue in terms of political importance for American voters.

Unfortunately, it’s unclear whether that growing awareness will reach a critical threshold before AI companies succeed in building uncontrollable self-improving superintelligence. I’ve been attempting to improve our odds by making videos.

Across YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, and X, I’ve already had various short-form videos surpass a million views, and have had my content shared by the likes of Eliezer Yudkowsky and Yoshua Bengio.

Through a mixture of news coverage, explainers, and sketches, I’m attempting to communicate the urgent need for a global pause on AI development to as wide an audience as possible.

What are this project's goals? How will you achieve them?

To get serious global political action that deals with the extinction threat of AI, we need to get to a world in which the majority of people understand the basic case for why rushing to build superintelligence could kill us all, where politicians feel comfortable discussing it, and an international nonpartisan consensus emerges that says “we all would rather not die and can work together to prevent that from happening”.

Polling shows people already pretty much agree that the extinction threat is real, they don’t trust AI companies to get this right, and they support a global pause on frontier AI development.

The number of people making content warning of the extinction threat of AI is growing, but one thing that’s largely missing is a consistent political focus.

Most existing content draws viewership from the science, philosophy and tech niches across social media. While there has been some overlap into the political niche, it remains a huge untapped source of awareness for our cause, and there’s no shortage of stuff to talk about (for example, OpenAI recently backed a bill that would shield them from liability if their model kills over 100 people - I haven't found another video other than mine that has covered it).

By using a similar format to existing political commentators, and covering AI stories (both policy and capabilities/misalignment) as breaking news, I’ve reached new audiences and can give this issue a sense of urgency that complements existing explainers and technical deep-dives.

My rough content strategy is as follows:

• 1-2 long-form YouTube videos per week mostly covering recent AI news

• Clip these up to get 1-4 clips per long-form video to share across YouTube shorts, Instagram reels, and TikTok

• 1-2 standalone short-form videos per week, which could be sketches, explainers, or time-sensitive reactions to news

Here are some stats from the last month:

• 372,000 views and 42,000 engagements on Instagram.

• 23,000 views on YouTube.

  • Including 6,000 on long-form videos.

• 21,000 on TikTok.

And here is the way I communicate the danger:

• Avoiding mincing my words by consistently and firmly stating that there is a real threat of human extinction.

• Continually referring to expert opinion and empirical studies.

• Shining a light on the deceptive tactics of AI lobbyists.

• Bringing in a diverse audience by highlighting the individuals sounding the alarm from across the political spectrum.

• Acknowledging the real concerns about job loss, misinformation, and power concentration, but not exaggerating things like water usage for rhetorical effect.

• Challenging the inevitability narrative by highlighting the growing concern of the public and politicians, the feasibility of an international treaty, and by pointing viewers to actionable steps they can take to help (such as contacting lawmakers).

I strongly believe that the case for AI x-risk is incredibly simple, and some in the AI safety community have massively overestimated the difficulty of getting both the public and politicians on board, as shown by the successes of orgs like ControlAI in getting 100+ UK lawmakers to join their campaign.

That’s why I think the main work to be done is to clearly explain the extinction threat (which in many cases simply means reminding people what they already think), and to increase the number of times throughout the day people are confronted with this issue.

Predicting growth on social media is difficult, but based on my recent traction, I aim to scale from my current hundreds of thousands of monthly views to reaching millions.

How will this funding be used?

The funding goal covers a year of full-time salary. I may also use a small portion to upgrade my microphone and camera if needed.

Who is on your team? What's your track record on similar projects?

The team is just me. 

I was previously the Communications Director at PauseAI, which primarily involved producing social media content. I also appeared on podcasts and on national radio.

Before working with PauseAI, I had a YouTube channel primarily focused on football which grew to 10,000 subscribers and had multiple long-form videos surpass 100,000 views.

I began to take AI x-risk seriously in 2020/2021 after first encountering it in The Precipice, and felt obliged to use my career to do something about it in late 2022. I’m quite socially/culturally distinct from the typical EA/rationalist types, which I think gives me somewhat of an advantage when it comes to communicating these risks to a general audience (especially given the documented problem of some audiences struggling to distinguish between AI accelerationists and AI safetyists).

What are the most likely causes and outcomes if this project fails?

• Growth in viewership may stagnate due to the potential audience size being smaller than expected.

• I may contribute to a sense of defeatism if most viral clips fail to mention what the solution is. As mentioned, to mitigate this, I will maintain a heavy focus on policy solutions and will point people to ways they can help.

• I may alienate certain groups if my messaging leans too heavily into the language of certain political factions, or if I’m seen to be dismissive of other AI concerns. To mitigate this, I’ll continue to acknowledge other valid harms of AI, and will frame the threat of extinction as the nonpartisan issue that it is.

How much money have you raised in the last 12 months, and from where?

No money has been raised so far, and I’ve been living off savings since beginning to do this full-time  ~3 months ago.