Yeah, as a previous top-three winner of the EA Forum Creative Writing Contest (see my story here) and of Future of Life Institute’s AI Worldbuilding contest (here), I agree that it seems like the default outcome is that even the winning stories don’t get a huge amount of circulation. The real impact would come from writing the one story that actually does go viral beyond the EA community. But this seems pretty hard to do; perhaps better to pick something that has already gone viral (perhaps an existing story like one of the Yudkowsky essays, or perhaps expanding on something like a very popular tweet to turn it into a story), and try to improve its presentation by polishing it, and perhaps adding illustrations or porting to other mediums like video / audio / etc.
That is why I am currently spending most of my EA effort helping out RationalAnimations, which sometimes writes original stuff but often adapts essays & topics that have preexisting traction within EA. (Suggestions welcome for things we might consider adapting!)
Could also be a cool mini-project of somebody’s, to go through the archive of existing rationalist/EA stories, and try and spruce them up with midjourney-style AI artwork; you might even be able to create some passable, relatively low-effort youtube videos just by doing a dramatic reading of the story and matching it up with panning imagery of midjourney / stock art?
On the other hand, writing stories is fun, and a $3000 prize pool is not too much to spend in the hopes of maybe generating the next viral EA story! I guess my concrete advice would be to put more emphasis on starting from a seed of something that’s already shown some viral potential (like a popular tweet making some point about AI safety, or a fanfic-style spinoff of a well-known story that is tweaked to contain an AI-relevant lesson, or etc).
Yeah, as a previous top-three winner of the EA Forum Creative Writing Contest (see my story here) and of Future of Life Institute’s AI Worldbuilding contest (here), I agree that it seems like the default outcome is that even the winning stories don’t get a huge amount of circulation. The real impact would come from writing the one story that actually does go viral beyond the EA community. But this seems pretty hard to do; perhaps better to pick something that has already gone viral (perhaps an existing story like one of the Yudkowsky essays, or perhaps expanding on something like a very popular tweet to turn it into a story), and try to improve its presentation by polishing it, and perhaps adding illustrations or porting to other mediums like video / audio / etc.
That is why I am currently spending most of my EA effort helping out RationalAnimations, which sometimes writes original stuff but often adapts essays & topics that have preexisting traction within EA. (Suggestions welcome for things we might consider adapting!)
Could also be a cool mini-project of somebody’s, to go through the archive of existing rationalist/EA stories, and try and spruce them up with midjourney-style AI artwork; you might even be able to create some passable, relatively low-effort youtube videos just by doing a dramatic reading of the story and matching it up with panning imagery of midjourney / stock art?
On the other hand, writing stories is fun, and a $3000 prize pool is not too much to spend in the hopes of maybe generating the next viral EA story! I guess my concrete advice would be to put more emphasis on starting from a seed of something that’s already shown some viral potential (like a popular tweet making some point about AI safety, or a fanfic-style spinoff of a well-known story that is tweaked to contain an AI-relevant lesson, or etc).