This is great! Props to Austin and Marcus for starting this conversation, and you (and Chana) for expanding on it.
As Austin puts it, there are actually at least three ways an AI Safety video could have an impact:
Introducing people to a topic
Convincing people to take an action (change careers, donate)
Providing information to people working in the field
I think this is right, and as you say, it’s hard to compare/rank videos when they have such different objectives. We don’t compare blogs to books, so comparing TikToks with high-production videos seems to be wrong for the same reasons.
Thanks! Just want to add some counterpoints and disclaimers to that: - 1. I want to flag that although I’ve filmed & edited ~20 short-form clips in the past (eg. from June 2022 to July 2025) around things like AI Policy and protests, most of the content I’ve recently been posting as just been clips from other interviews. So I think it would also be unfair to compare my clips and original content (both short-form and longform), which is why I wrote this post. (I started doing this because I ran out of footage to edit shortform videos as I was trying to publish one TikTok a day, and these clips eventually reached way more people than what I was doing before, so I transitioned to doing that). - 2. regarding comparing to high-production videos: I don’t want to come across as saying we shouldn’t compare work of different length or using different budgets. I think Marcus and Austin’s attempt is honorable. Also, being able to correctly use a large budget to make a high-production video that reaches as many people as many lower budget videos requires a lot of skill, though once you have that level of skill then the amount of time you spend on a video to make it really good ends up leading to exponential results in views (if you make something that is 10% better, Youtube will push it much more than 10% more).
This is great! Props to Austin and Marcus for starting this conversation, and you (and Chana) for expanding on it.
I think this is right, and as you say, it’s hard to compare/rank videos when they have such different objectives. We don’t compare blogs to books, so comparing TikToks with high-production videos seems to be wrong for the same reasons.
Thanks! Just want to add some counterpoints and disclaimers to that:
- 1. I want to flag that although I’ve filmed & edited ~20 short-form clips in the past (eg. from June 2022 to July 2025) around things like AI Policy and protests, most of the content I’ve recently been posting as just been clips from other interviews. So I think it would also be unfair to compare my clips and original content (both short-form and longform), which is why I wrote this post. (I started doing this because I ran out of footage to edit shortform videos as I was trying to publish one TikTok a day, and these clips eventually reached way more people than what I was doing before, so I transitioned to doing that).
- 2. regarding comparing to high-production videos: I don’t want to come across as saying we shouldn’t compare work of different length or using different budgets. I think Marcus and Austin’s attempt is honorable. Also, being able to correctly use a large budget to make a high-production video that reaches as many people as many lower budget videos requires a lot of skill, though once you have that level of skill then the amount of time you spend on a video to make it really good ends up leading to exponential results in views (if you make something that is 10% better, Youtube will push it much more than 10% more).