AI Risk Sensemaking Through Interactive Future Scenarios

Raising $8,000active

12-week project to build and user-test a web interactive narrative prototype that communicates AI risk scenarios to non-technical young adults, producing notes, feedback data, and a public write-up.

Project Details

It is an exploratory project that is 12 weeks long and is an investigation into risk communication and sensemaking for AI. I will develop and validate an easy-to-understand and accessible interactive prototype that brings AI-related risk scenarios to life in a narrative format for non-technical young adults.

The project will study real-world scenarios of AI misuse, excessive dependence on AI agents, personalization of AI systems and its manipulation, misinformation, and the trade-offs in governance of advanced AI system deployment. The aim of this project is not to be a technical alignment research. The project aims to explore the use of interactive formats of future scenarios to evaluate their utility for communicating AI risk concepts to individuals outside the current AI safety community.

The concrete outputs will be:

2. 20-30 inserted notes; and

2. a light prototype based on the web;

3. user testing using around 100-200 non technical young adults;

4. qualitative and quantitative feedback regarding what the users understood, misunderstood, and what motivated them;

5. a public write-up summarizing findings, limitations and suggestions for future AI risk communication work.

I am well positioned to execute this as I am a solo founder building a live AI narrative product on both web and mobile, have experience building consumer facing AI products, acquiring early users with a limited budget and iterating off user feedback.

Theory of Impact

Many ideas for AI x-risk are challenging to understand for non-technical people. Similar concepts and terms can be hard to understand unless they are brought into a real context like a model-based use scenario, a governance dilemma, or a race to deployment.

This project is a way to indirectly mitigate AI x-risk by enhancing the ability of the public to make sense of advanced AI risks. It's possible for non-technical users to grasp potential AI risk scenarios, be able to participate in discussions around AI safety, identify problematic trends like overreliance, manipulation, misinformation, and unsafe deployment incentives, and be better equipped to engage in responsible governance.

The project is exploratory and exploratory programming. Its significance is to determine if interactive narrative scenarios are a valuable communication medium for AI safety. If successful, the results might be incorporated into future public education resources, risk communication campaigns for AI, community engagement initiatives, or more expansive studies on understanding AI risk across various audiences.

The biggest question is whether such an approach can help to significantly add to or distract from the user's understanding. To tackle this, the project will gather feedback from users prior to and following exposure to these scenarios, monitor understanding, perceived relevance, and user description of risks involved with AI.

People

wei jiang

Team Member

Grants Received– no grants recorded

Add grant

Funding Asks

grantmaking.ai Launch Round

Applied

Minimum

$8,000

Ideal

$20,000

How the money will be spent

Founder / researcher stipend for 12 weeks: $12,000 – funds focused execution on research design, prototype direction, user testing and final analysis, full-time or near full-time.

Prototype development and technical infrastructure $3,000 For lightweight web prototype development, web hosting, analytics and technical tools for experiment.

User research recruitment and incentives $2,000 Supports recruiting 100-200 non-technical users and paying users for feedback as necessary.

Writing, designing, and producing content for AI risk scenarios $1,500 Enables the creation of 10-15 AI risk scenario modules and user-facing content.

Writing and editing the document, and sharing the findings with others $1,500 Covers writing, editing, documenting, and sharing the final results with the public.

Total - $20,000 - Full 12 week exploratory project.

Discussion

No comments yet. Be the first to share your thoughts.