Idea: Repository for AI Safety Presentations

By Eitan @ 2025-01-06T13:04 (+13)

I'm from Argentina, where there's almost no community built. In this last semester, we (@Luca De Leo and I) started a university group at the University of Buenos Aires (UBA), and since then I've been practicing on how to effectively communicate on AI Safety.

In this context, I recently gave an AI Safety intro talk on an event. It took me ~5hs of work to make the slides, and ~1.5hs to practice it, so about a working day in total: Not so long considering, but could've taken longer had I not based it on Rob Miles' presentation.

Here's a few hot takes (please, do disagree with any):

• Doing targeted outreach on AI Safety can have great impact:
  • Aiming outreach to people that already respect you could more easily convince them of the risks associated with AI development, and get them to take action.
• Most people are bad at making and giving presentations:
  • In my experience, people are generally bad at this. Most common mistakes include filling the slides with text, not being clear at what they want to communicate from the start, not including a call to action at the end, etc.
• Good presentations take a long time to create:
  • In my personal experience, even if you're really keen on the subject, you may not have experience on how to effectively communicate the relevant ideas within the field. This makes the planning phase relatively long, leaving less time to a fundamental stage: practicing the presentation.

To decrease the effort and increase the quality of the presentations, I propose creating and maintaining a repository of AI Safety talks, so that anyone who would like to give a talk on Safety could just remix one that was already made.

Do you think this might be a good idea? Does this already exist?