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My write-up as of September 2025 - feel free to ask me for a more updated Source of Truth if you're interested in this space - and please let me know what I’m missing!

Key Players Making Video:

Organization

  • Palisade Research:
    • Does research on AI for policymakers and communicators.
    • Has started its own video program - check out their videos! Run by Petr Lebedev, an ex-producer/scriptwriter for Veritasium
  • Future of Life Institute (FLI): Has an accelerator program to fund creators making AI-related videos.
  • AI Digest: Produces explainers on AI and as far as I know might be interested in someone running a video program for them
  • Control AI is getting great clips from podcasts and putting them up on Twitter. I've suggested that they should create a spreadsheet of these so everyone can use them in their videos.
  • "Fancier Crowd" that I’m going to be vague about: People with experience in Netflix pitches and successful political social media campaigns are becoming more involved in communicating AI safety through video, often independent of EA organizations
  • Conor Axiotes: making an AI documentary
  • Michael Trazzi: Made the SB 1047 Documentary and makes TikToks
  • 80,000 Hours Video Program (AI in Context):
    • Two full-time people (Chana Messinger, Aric Floyd) and contractors.
    • Our main effort is the YouTube channel "AI in Context."
    • Eventually we might look to expand - more videos, more channels, maybe pitching to streaming services
    • Scriptwriting is our current biggest bottleneck
    • We contract for production and film people (lights, camera work, sound)
  • 80,000 Hours podcast is released as videos

Organizations that might be interested in doing more video

  • Giving What We Can
  • Seismic Foundation: aims to raise public awareness and engagement with AI safety through broad-reach, relatable content for targeted groups of the general public, such as series and documentaries. They're also starting up a content engine - they're looking for creator partnerships, amplifying content or ideas from other AI Safety organizations and they're on the hunt for a host / talent for some of their projects.

Youtubers / Tiktokkers

Not a complete list of people in this space

Longform

Tiktok

  • Zac of the Neural guide pivoted recently to talking about AI Safety
  • parthknowsai: daily videos explaining AI news, sometimes AI safety relevant papers
  • nicole_flowing: talks about the implications of AI, and sometimes AI Safety related stuff
  • _dbrogle: daily technical AI explainers + some other stuff

Filmmakers

  • Kate Hammond, of https://www.softcutfilms.com/ is making an AI Safety Documentary
  • Elizabeth Cox, of Should We Studios, producing Ada, about pressing problems
  • Other points of connection to Hollywood

Retreats / coordination / upskilling

  • Mox populi
  • I've heard about two other people who are considering putting on coordination retreats for people interested in this space. 

Lots of people are interested in working on this / helping out:

e.g.

  • Another ex-big channel producer/scriptwriter might be interested in getting involved
    • We know several people from the ex-Veritasium crowd
  • Some of the people who worked on Michael Trazzi’s documentary
  • People in the “EA Youtuber” WhatsApp group chat
  • I know of two videographers interested in x-risk looking for work
  • Someone who’s done videography on both sides of the camera and has done scriptwriting before and is poking around the space
  • Someone making tools for video creators
  • And others!
  • I also have a long list of folks from the expression of interest forms I have out

 

Reach out if you'd like to be involved, have experience in video, or know people who do!

Comments10
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There's a decent amount of French-speaking ~AI safety content on YouTube:

“Scriptwriting is our current biggest bottleneck” Can you elaborate a bit? Is the hard part deciding what the messages are that you want to deliver or rather how to deliver them? 

Not sure if that’s the same distinction I would make but broadly just takes a long time to write a full script that we’re happy with, which includes figuring out the right structure, the high level narratives, the beats we want to hit, the takeaways, giving it a good emotional arc, etc.

On CGP Grey, he has 6.8M YouTube subs and seems to get the alignment concerns. He recently conveyed the alignment risk in this episode of his tech podcast (Revisiting Humans Need not Apply):

"AI is more like biological weapons because they can act autonomously and evolve beyond what you built. Nuclear bombs don't walk out of factories on their own, pathogens do."

Might be worth someone reaching out about e.g. sponsorship. 

"People with experience in Netflix pitches and successful political social media campaigns are becoming more involved in communicating AI safety through video, often independent of EA organizations"- why aren't we able to attract them towards this forum at least? Or maybe agents who are working with those people?

Glad you're working with some of the people I recommended to you, I'm very proud of that SB-1047 documentary team.

I would add to the list Suzy Shepherd who made Writing Doom. I believe she will relatively soon be starting another film. I wrote more about her work here.

FAR AI posts recordings of talks from the events they organise on YouTube. 

IMO that's a different category - there's a lot of that kind of thing as well and I'm glad it exists but I think it's useful to separate out.

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