Daystar—this is a great idea, and I hope you get lots of strong submissions. People think and decide based on stories they hear, or stories they tell themselves. Good AI fiction can be helpful in guiding people to understand AI risks.
Two concerns though.
One concerns the marginal benefits of new writing, versus the benefits of assembling the best existing short stories about AI futures and risks. Ever since ‘Frankenstein’ (1818) by Mary Shelley, we’ve had over 200 years of science fiction writing about creating nonhuman/artificial intelligences, and that includes a lot of excellent very short stories. Would it be worth identifying and collecting some of the best existing writing on AI, and publishing that? I guess the counterargument would be that we’ve had a lot of rapid progress on AI safety thinking in the last 10-20 years, which has not been incorporated in much science fiction yet, so newer writing might be more relevant.
The other concern is how to maximize impact once you select some great writing on this topic. I agree with some of the other comments that turning the short stories into YouTube videos for a popular, established channel (e.g. Rational Animations, or Kurzgesagt, or whatever) could be very compelling. It’s much easier for videos to get a lot of attention than for short stories to get a lot of attention. (If I tweet about a video, I can be confident that at least a few hundred people will watch it, and retweet/quote-tweet about it; if I tweet about a short story, it’s likely that less than 10 people will read it, and very few will retweet about it). So this contest could be framed as a sort of ‘screenwriting pitch’ in some sense, rather than as thinking of the stories themselves as the key deliverables.
Yes, we’ve definitely talked about collecting fiction that already exists and is still relevant to the modern understanding of the issues involved. That’s why I’m happy for people to submit existing stories as well, and one thing we’ve discussed is possibly reaching out to authors of such stories or whoever holds their rights to interweave them with new stories if we try to publish in a traditional anthology.
Same with turning fables into videos; we’re pretty confident that if we get a few good stories out of this, turning them into animations or short audiobooks will be worth doing :)
Daystar—this is a great idea, and I hope you get lots of strong submissions. People think and decide based on stories they hear, or stories they tell themselves. Good AI fiction can be helpful in guiding people to understand AI risks.
Two concerns though.
One concerns the marginal benefits of new writing, versus the benefits of assembling the best existing short stories about AI futures and risks. Ever since ‘Frankenstein’ (1818) by Mary Shelley, we’ve had over 200 years of science fiction writing about creating nonhuman/artificial intelligences, and that includes a lot of excellent very short stories. Would it be worth identifying and collecting some of the best existing writing on AI, and publishing that? I guess the counterargument would be that we’ve had a lot of rapid progress on AI safety thinking in the last 10-20 years, which has not been incorporated in much science fiction yet, so newer writing might be more relevant.
The other concern is how to maximize impact once you select some great writing on this topic. I agree with some of the other comments that turning the short stories into YouTube videos for a popular, established channel (e.g. Rational Animations, or Kurzgesagt, or whatever) could be very compelling. It’s much easier for videos to get a lot of attention than for short stories to get a lot of attention. (If I tweet about a video, I can be confident that at least a few hundred people will watch it, and retweet/quote-tweet about it; if I tweet about a short story, it’s likely that less than 10 people will read it, and very few will retweet about it). So this contest could be framed as a sort of ‘screenwriting pitch’ in some sense, rather than as thinking of the stories themselves as the key deliverables.
In any case, it’s well worth doing!
Yes, we’ve definitely talked about collecting fiction that already exists and is still relevant to the modern understanding of the issues involved. That’s why I’m happy for people to submit existing stories as well, and one thing we’ve discussed is possibly reaching out to authors of such stories or whoever holds their rights to interweave them with new stories if we try to publish in a traditional anthology.
Same with turning fables into videos; we’re pretty confident that if we get a few good stories out of this, turning them into animations or short audiobooks will be worth doing :)