Against the AI framing multiverse: Introducing AI StopWatch

Note from Joe: This post was written by my colleague Mitch Howe, who lacks an EA Forum account. But I thought it worth sharing here. You can read the original at the LessWrong link above.

In my long years as a classroom teacher, it was my experience that the kid most likely to speak up during discussion was the one who did the reading.

I think it’s true for adults, too. I know that’s not exactly revelatory, but it’s one of the guiding principles behind AI StopWatch, the experimental newsroom we (parts of the MIRI comms team) launched in May, after a month of closed beta testing.

StopWatch’s other guiding principle is that the reading needs to make sense. Imagine if every page that kid read came from a different book by the same name, and if most of these different books were just reflections of what people who didn’t read it imagined it would be.

If the book in question were To Kill a Mockingbird, then (speaking from experience) this would mean that on one page, the Finch family is Black and oppressed. The next page is a hunting manual. Flip the page again, and Scout is a boy. Flip to a page near the end, and Atticus might win the case.

This is how the media landscape around AI looks to me. Even when the facts agree, the frames are so varied that it’s like the articles, op-eds, and videos are drawn from many parallel universes, each reflecting a different story people used to imagine about how AI would play out.

On the same day, sometimes in the same publication, you will find artifacts from universes where AI is coming for all the jobs, and others from universes where AI is a useless regurgitator — a scam, even.

Represented are universes where AI can of course never be catastrophically dangerous because it can only do what people ask. But so are universes where AI will of course be catastrophically dangerous because it will do what people ask — and still other universes (rarer) where AI will of course be catastrophically dangerous because it won’t actually do what people ask.

In some universes, AI will be safely constrained, because it will never have [special human quality] or be able to experience [quintessentially human thing]. In others, AI will be prone to dangerous excess, because it will never be bound by [special human quality] or be able to experience [quintessentially human thing]. (Universes where AI can, in fact, gain [special human quality] and may have already done so are either very rare or very underrepresented.)

Some universes nervously watch for the day when AI will wake up and become sentient, because that’s when it will turn on its creators. But in others, the reverse is true, and the urgent thing is to give AI consciousness so that it can learn to love us before it’s too late. But in many, perhaps most universes, machines can of course never be conscious — that’s a special human quality. (Universes where consciousness may not be a binary condition appear scarce, along with those where consciousness has little bearing on AI’s destructive potential.)

The distribution of universes dropping artifacts into our media is not stable or consistent. Since mid-January, I have been plotting the patterns like one might plot the weather. A key finding is that news objects act as conduits that preferentially channel some universes over others.

Take a Molotov cocktail, for example: When one hit the gate of Sam Altman’s home on April 10, we saw a modest bump in missives from universes matching the suspect’s concern that AI is an existential risk. These were soon drowned out by transmissions from universes where x-risk concerns are just dangerous fearmongering, and from others where x-risk is a cynical branding strategy used to hype company valuations.

At the end of February, Claude’s reported assistance with the American military’s assault on Iran brought the first big spike in artifacts from universes where AI is the key to battlefield dominance. Such spikes seem to somewhat suppress our contact with universes where human qualities are irreplaceable.

Don’t put too much stock in my charts. The methodology behind them is crude: In six months, my colleagues and I have ingested roughly 3,400 media artifacts into my database. For each, I’ve had Claude Opus identify up to four implicit assumptions it makes. Once a week, I have Claude cluster the previous seven days’ framing assumptions according to some stable descriptors and then plot the relative rankings of these clusters. (You can also see their absolute tallies, along with their descriptors, in my interactive dashboard, a vibe-coded tool I haven’t tried to fully de-jank.)

My point is that the frames around AI are all over the place. In this media environment, I don’t know how anyone without long exposure to AI insiders is supposed to form a useful model of AI’s shape and trajectory. I think that’s a problem. It’s a main reason we started AI StopWatch — a Substack for helping non-insiders keep up with AI so they feel more confident speaking up about the dangers of racing to superintelligence. I wanted a news site I could easily recommend to my mother, my congressional representative, content creators, journalists who aren’t already plugged into insider chatter, and everyone in between.

There are plenty of AI news aggregators out there, but none that matched my requirements. The automated sites don’t address the chaotic framing problem. Others are a jargony firehose (love you, Zvi!), or are insufficiently discriminating about their sources. Some have a stable frame, but that frame doesn’t reflect the universe I think we actually live in. Some only publish sporadically.

At AI StopWatch, we typically post between two and five times a day, seven days a week. Every evening, we compile the day’s posts — which are low on jargon, high on water cooler discussability (we hope) — into an email-friendly “Daily Digest,” which we also release as a ~10-20 minute audio podcast a few hours later. We think the podcast is a stand-out feature; a surprising number of people we know in our target audience can’t bring themselves to regularly read written news or blogs but already subscribe to many podcasts.

Our posts cover a timely mix of stories we think might matter and stories that make good conversation starters. We try to add value over vanilla aggregators by augmenting stories with insider insights, and by surfacing stories mass media hasn’t picked up on yet. We also dabble in original analysis and food for thought.

We’re not coy about our frame — our tagline declares that we are writing “Dispatches from a world racing to extinction.” But we try not to beat readers over the head with that. We’re happy to provide ammunition for people who have their own reasons for stopping the AI race, though we strive to call out bad arguments and shoddy evidence.

The StopWatch project could use your help. If you’re reading this on LessWrong, you’re probably not our core target audience — you already have a coherent model of the AI problem, fluency with the jargon, and news channels you trust (or at least know how to discount). But we hope you’ll check us out and share AI StopWatch with your contacts who aren’t as immersed in the issues but want to be more informed. Some of our posts might be interesting to you, too, and we would welcome your free subscription.

We’re also looking to publish more guest posts from strong writers who understand our frame and voice and have original pitches to share. (Payment is available. DM me for more information.)^[1]

If nothing else, we hope you’ll keep an eye out for StopWatch social media posts on Substack, X/Twitter, Facebook, Bluesky, and Threads, and throw them a like, comment, or repost from time to time.

Thanks for doing the reading. I’d tell you it’ll be on the test, but the test has been underway for some time — most people just don’t realize it yet. Maybe AI StopWatch can help.

1. ^{^}

   Joe here. Since Mitch isn't on the EA Forum as of the time of this writing, feel free to DM me instead and I'll pass along the interest.