Should other EA cause areas try to copy the recent success of AI safety videos?
By Forumite @ 2025-10-24T21:19 (+12)
80k's new YouTube channel, AI in Context, scored a stunning success when their first video racked up millions of views very quickly.
This video from Species AI raced to 8 million views in 3 weeks.
Wow! Kudos to everyone involved in making these...
Why were these videos so successful?
They clearly have talented, charismatic presenters, punchy scripts, and impressive visual production values.
I wonder to what extent that explains their success, vs. the innate topicality and high level of public interest in AI...
Should other EA cause areas try to replicate this success? Could they hope to reach these dizzying levels of virality?
What kinds of topics should they focus on? What could an animal welfare focussed video focus on, for example...?
JoA🔸 @ 2025-10-25T04:59 (+2)
Interesting question! Might the Kurzgesagt video on factory farming count as an example of this for animal welfare? If someone wants to do it again, they could try to assess what they think the video did right (and wrong) and improve upon it. Maybe some cues on messaging could be taken from Lewis Bollard's fairly successful appearance on the Dwarkesh podcast?
Also, a potential reason why AI Safety focused on it (compared to other cause areas) might be that they have pipelines which can absorb a fair amount of people, and so they find it more worthwhile to launch broad outreach that could get a few dozen counterfactual people applying to fellowships, and the like? This may less be the case for other causes when it comes to talent - I assume that for animal welfare and global health, the informal theory of change behind funding a high-quality video would be rather donation-focused. However, I could be wrong about the talent pipeline reason, and maybe some content creation funders mostly want to raise broad awareness of AI risk issues (seemed to be the case for the Future of Life Institute).