Stampy's AI Safety Info soft launch

Robert Miles

I am not an expert in AI but I can help with clarity.

I started at the top. The first section, “New to AI Safety” means close to nothing for someone new to AI generally. Is that okay with you? For example, if I read this as if I had no knowledge:

“In recent years, we’ve seen AI systems grow increasingly capable.”

Capable of what? What kind of systems?

“They may soon attain human and even strongly superhuman skill in a wide range of domains.”

Attain superhuman skill? How?

“Such systems could bring great benefits, but if their goals don’t line up with human values, they could also cause unprecedented disasters, including human extinction.”

This is where you would probably lose someone who doesn’t understand AI fundamentals. This might be nitpicky but you did say this is being created for all audiences. Hopefully more helpful than nitpicky.

If the site is designed for someone familiar with fundamentals but not safety, then this criticism is annulled.

Another criticism I have is the way the definitions show up as dotted underline + hover text for each instance of the word. For example, AGI shows up several times in some of the paragraphs—it feels excessive to have so many underlines and hovertexts instead of simply defining the first instance.

[-]steven04612y*31

Thanks, yes, this is a helpful type of feedback. We'll think about how to make that section make more sense without background knowledge. The site is aimed at all audiences, and this means we'll have to navigate tradeoffs about text leaving gaps in justifying claims vs. being too long vs. not having enough scope to be an overview. In this case, it does look like we could make the tradeoff on the side of adding a bit more text and links. Your point about the glossary sounds reasonable and I'll pass it along. (I guess the tradeoff there is people might see an unexplained term and not realize that an earlier instance of it had a glossary link.)

[-]Caleb Biddulph2y50

Thanks for doing this, this looks like it'll be very helpful for beginners in AI safety, and the content looks great!

I don't know if this will be addressed in your UI redesign, but I find the UI very counterintuitive. The main problem is that when I open and then close a tab, I expect every sub-tab to collapse and return to the previous state. Instead, the more tabs I open, the more cluttered the space gets, and there's no way to undo it unless I remove the back part of the URL and reload, or click the Stampy logo.

In addition, it's impossible to tell which tab was originally nested under which parent tab, which makes it much more difficult to navigate. And confusingly, sometimes there are "random" tabs that don't necessarily follow directly from their parent tabs (took me a while to figure this out). On a typical webpage, I could imagine thinking "this subtopic is really interesting; I'm going to try to read every tab under it until I'm done," but these design choices are pretty demotivating for that.

I don't have a precise solution in mind, but maybe it would help to color-code different kinds of tabs (maybe a color each for root tabs, leaf tabs, non-root branching tabs, and "random" tabs). You could also use more than two visual layers of nesting - if you're worried about tabs getting narrower and narrower, maybe you could animate the tab expanding to full width and then sliding back into place when it's closed. Currently an "unread" tab is represented by a slight horizontal offset, but you could come up with another visual cue for that. I guess doing lots of UX interviews and A/B testing will be more helpful than anything I could say here.

[-]steven04612y21

You're right that it's confusing, and we've been planning to change how collapsing and expanding works. I don't think specifics have been decided on yet; I'll pass your ideas along.

I don't think there should be "random" tabs, unless you mean the ones that appear from the "show more questions" option at the bottom. In some cases, the content of child questions may not relate in an obvious way to the content of their parent question. Is that what you mean? If questions are appearing despite not 1) being linked anywhere below "Related" in the doc corresponding to the question that was expanded, or 2) being left over from a different question that was expanded earlier, then I think that's a bug, and I'd be interested in an example.

[-][anonymous]2y50

Who has funded AI safety.info so far?

[-]steven04612y90

Quoting from our Manifund application:

We have received around $46k from SHfHS and $54k from LTFF, both for running content writing fellowships. We have been offered a $75k speculation grant from Lightspeed Grants for an additional fellowship, and made a larger application to them for the dev team which has not been accepted. We have also recently made an application to Open Philanthropy.

[-][anonymous]2y52

UI suggestion: make it scroll so the full answer is in view after user clicks on a question box. (Removes a trivial inconvenience)

[-]Shankar Sivarajan2y20

Like teaching someone to recognize bad kerning (relevant xkcd), this wasn't even a trivial inconvenience until you mentioned it, and now it's the worst thing in UI since the close button not aligned to the corner.

[-]steven04612y30

EA Forum version (manually crossposting to make coauthorship work on both posts):

https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/mHNoaNvpEuzzBEEfg/stampy-s-ai-safety-info-soft-launch

^{^}

E.g. in comments or direct messages here, or by posting on Discord or contacting stevenk3458 there.

^{^}

It's not necessary, but using a Google account will make this a bit easier – that way, your comments will show up under your name.

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