Announcing AISafety.info's Write-a-thon (June 16-18) and Second Distillation Fellowship (July 3-October 2)

Stampy’s AI Safety Info is an interactive FAQ started by Rob Miles that aims to be the best one-stop source of information about AI existential safety, gathering summaries and links on each of hundreds of subtopics.

Now that the first fellowship is nearing an end, we’re preparing for a second distillation fellowship from July 3rd through October 2nd. Distillation fellows will be working with each other and with me to improve the site further by editing the existing answers and writing new ones. They’ll be paid $2500 per month for three months working full-time as remote contractors. (Partial fellowships will probably be possible as well.) We’ll have at least five spots for fellows, and maybe more.

We’re also announcing a hackathon-style event, which we’re organizing together with Apart Research, on the 16th, 17th, and 18th of June. People are invited to write and edit articles during whichever parts of those days best fit their schedules. (If you’re unable to attend on those days, you can still participate by choosing another contiguous three-day period between now and the event—for example, next weekend—to write all your entries in.)

Collaboration on the event will take place on Discord as well as on gather.town. I’ll be online for those three days to lead the event and answer any questions. We encourage people to work together on entries during that time, but we encourage one individual to be in charge of each entry.^[1]

Submitting good articles and helping other people write their articles in the write-a-thon will be the main criteria we’ll use to select distillation fellows. There will also be prize money for the best entries: $1000, $600, $300, and $100 for the best four, and $200 for one randomly chosen (serious) entry.

We will have a more specific list of suggested questions to use for entries later, but for now, you can look at the “Not started” part of Stampy’s list of questions, and take a look at existing articles and the style guidelines for what an article should look like. (You can also use a new question of your own devising; to make sure you’re not wasting your effort on a question that won’t fit on the site, you can ask on Discord or check with me.)

We wanted to put this announcement up without waiting longer, but we’re still finalizing some of the details, so check back in the coming days for further details on submission instructions, an application form, and the like.

If you want to help out in some other way, AISafety.info welcomes donations (details soon), volunteer editors, and volunteer coders.

If you have questions about the write-a-thon, the fellowship, or anything else, feel free to ask in the comments or message me here or on Discord (StevenK#3458).

(Edit 2023-06-09: See this doc for the most up-to-date information about how to participate and about the schedule. In case any of you want to participate early, it’s best to look through that and visit Discord.)

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Keep track of who else was helpful; there will be a rank-ordering question in the application form for who you’d most like to work with. Making a joint entry with multiple people is also possible, but makes it harder to assign credit.

Announcing AISafety.info’s Write-a-thon (June 16-18) and Second Distillation Fellowship (July 3-October 2)