@MarcusAbramovitch Thanks for the questions. Let me address both points:

On the work involved: I spend 5-6 hours a day going through multiple podcasts to find the very best clips, where most of them don't end up being posted. There's also editing / uploading work (2-3 hours) on top of that that is hard to see (adapting things from vertical vs. horizontal by scaling / position / changing backgrounds, iterating on different captions, fixing the audio, fixing subtitles, upscaling, uploading to different platforms, checking on different devices). It definitely gets to a full day of work, especially as I do more clips.

6 figure (annualized) salary: I've spent some time thinking about how much money I would ask to pay for my time on this grant. One important word above is "work full-time on this project productively". I did consider other amounts that would mean basically only paying bills and nothing else, but I don't think that'd have been sustainable nor helpful to make this project go well.

To give more context, last year I made the mistake of under-budgeting on my salary for the SB-1047 documentary (see post-mortem here), which meant that I basically paid myself for only 2 of the ~8-9 months I spent on this. One lesson I learned from this is that compensating yourself for your time is not just a cherry on top after you have everything else figured out, but something necessary to work on something productively for extended periods of time.

> And assuming you believe in AI safety sufficiently, if you only get $12.4k (current amount as of this comment) in funding, are you going to just quit posting in 6 weeks and a day

After 6 weeks of full-time work, I'd evaluate options to maximize the project's continued impact: transitioning to part-time while fundraising, mentoring someone to continue, or documenting my process for others to pick it up.

I appreciate the clarifying questions, let me know if you need anything else.

@MarcusAbramovitch Yeah, I also like the idea, but $100-$300 per tiktok clip seems weirdly expensive. If you drop this due to insufficient funding I hope someone picks up the idea as a hobby

Seconded -- I am interested in this project but want to hear more about what outcomes you hope to achieve from an expanded audience

I agree. Awareness is good in general, but some of the most watched clips don't really touch on AI Safety, and none of them have calls to action. ("Learn More Here," "Share This," "Call your representatives," etc.)

@NeelNanda Yes that was a typo, fixed it!

Regarding messages and outcomes (cc @NeelNanda, @Jesse-Richardson and @Haiku), see below my strategy which includes a diagram summarizing the approach (also included in the main proposal):

1. Messages: my goal is to promote content that is fully or partly about AI Safety:

   1. Fully AI safety content: Tristan Harris (176k views) on Anthropic's blackmail results, summarizes recent AI safety research in a way that is accessible for most people. Daniel Kokotajlo (55k views) on fast takeoff scenarios, introduces the concept of automated AI R&D, and related AI governance issues. These show that AI Safety content can get high reach if the delivery or editing is good enough.

   2. Partly / Indirectly AI safety content: Ilya Sutskever (156k views) on AI doing all human jobs, the need for honest superintelligence and AI being the biggest issue of our time. Sam Altman (400k views) on sycophancy. These help with general AI awareness that makes viewers receptive to safety messages moving forward.

   3. "AI is a big deal" content: Sam Altman (600k views) talking about ChatGPT logs not being private in the case of a lawsuit. These videos aren't directly about safety but establish that AI is becoming a major societal issue.

The overall strategy here is to prioritize posting fully-safety content that has the potential to have high reach, then go for the partly / indirectly safety content that walks people through why AI could be a risk, and sometimes post some content that is more generally about AI being a big deal, bringing even more people in.

2. Outcomes: Rather than adding call-to-actions at the end of videos, which unfortunately makes videos much less likely to reach a lot of people on Tiktok (mostly because people would exit instead of re-watching the video) and is quite uncommon to do on tiktok compared to Youtube, especially for clips, I'm expecting the outcomes to be:

   1. Engagement / Following: about 50k people (3-4%) engaged with the content (shares, likes, comments, follows). I expect that the people who engaged will continue seeing my content in the future (because TikTok will push it). In some cases, they will end up engaging more and more with the content that is directly about safety, and eventually integrate the broader AI Safety ecosystem (to a certain degree).

   2. Profile clicks: About 0.5% of viewers click on the channel's profile (I've received 5k+ profile views). The two outcomes from that are:

      1. Watching the pinned videos: 4k views on the 3 pinned videos came from these 5k profile clicks, meaning a large fraction who click on the profile click on pinned. I think in the future one of these pinned videos could be a video with a strong CTA that directly leads to outcomes we care about around informing the public / representatives about AI Safety, similar to this one which had a very high conversion rate in having viewers take action.

      2. Clicking on the link in bio: so far I don't have a clickable link, but plan to link to eg. aisafety.com to redirect to resources to learn more about AI Safety.

   3. Progressive exposure: Most people who eventually work on AI safety needed multiple exposures from different sources before taking action. Even viewers who don't click anywhere are getting those crucial early exposures that add up over time.

Gotcha, thanks! @michaeltrazzi

That seems a pretty reasonable plan and you've gotten good reach. I'm not confident this is a good idea, but I think that's plausible and more value of information here would be good, so I've donated another month's worth. Good luck!

Thanks @NeelNanda !

Thanks for sharing! My other question is how much time you're spending on this a week? Is the TikTok + YouTube stuff roughly a full-time job at the moment?

@Jesse-Richardson Yes it's full-time.

I wrote down more details in my answer to Marcus here.