Get involved

This page collects some common questions people have about how to use Stampy's Wiki.

What is the Stampy project?

Edit question

Edit answer

The Stampy Project is an open effort to build a comprehensive FAQ about artificial intelligence existential safety—the field trying to make sure that when we build superintelligent artificial systems they are aligned with human values so that they do the kinds of things we would like them to do.

We're also building Stampy the AI Safety Bot, who will soon be capable of using the FAQ and other sources to educate people about AI alignment via an interactive natural language interface.

[Show detailed answer]

[Show brief answer]

The Stampy project is an open effort to build a comprehensive FAQ about artificial intelligence existential safety—the field trying to make sure that when we build superintelligent artificial systems they are aligned with human values so that they do the kinds of things we would like them to do.

We're also building Stampy the AI Safety Bot, who will soon be capable of using the FAQ and other sources to educate people about AI alignment via an interactive natural language interface.

The goals of the project are to:

• Offer a one-stop-shop for high-quality answers to common questions about AI alignment.
  • Let people answer questions in a way which scales, freeing up researcher time while allowing more people to learn from a reliable source.
  • Make external resources more easy to find by having links to them connected to a search engine which gets smarter the more it's used.
• Provide a form of legitimate peripheral participation for the AI Safety community, as an on-boarding path with a flexible level of commitment.
  • Encourage people to think, read, and talk about AI alignment while answering questions, creating a community of co-learners who can give each other feedback and social reinforcement.
  • Provide a way for budding researchers to prove their understanding of the topic and ability to produce good work.
• Collect data about the kinds of questions people actually ask and how they respond, so we can better focus resources on answering them.
  • Track reactions on messages so we can learn which answers need work.
  • Identify missing external content to create.

How can I contribute to Stampy?

Edit question

Edit answer

If you're not already there, join the public Discord and ask for an invite to the semi-private one where contributors generally hang out.

The main ways you can help are to answer questions or add questions, or help to review questions, review answers, or improve answers (instructions for helping out with each of these tasks are on the linked pages). You could also join the dev team if you have programming skills.

One great thing you can do is write up a Google Doc with your top ~10 questions and post it to the Discord, or ask you friends to do the same (see follow-up question on collecting questions for a template message).

How can I collect questions for Stampy?

Edit question

Edit answer

As well as simply adding your own questions over at ask question, you could also message your friends with something like:

Hi,

I'm working on a project to create a comprehensive FAQ about AI alignment (you can read about it here https://stampy.ai/wiki/Stampy%27s_Wiki if interested). We're looking for questions and I thought you may have some good ones. If you'd be willing to write up a google doc with you top 5-10ish questions we'd be happy to write a personalized FAQ for you. https://stampy.ai/wiki/Scope explains the kinds of questions we're looking for.

Thanks!

and maybe bring the google doc to a Stampy editing session so we can collaborate on answering them or improving your answers to them.

What kind of questions do we want on Stampy?

Edit question

Edit answer

Stampy is focused specifically on AI existential safety (both introductory and technical questions), but does not aim to cover general AI questions or other topics which don't interact strongly with the effects of AI on humanity's long-term future.

[Show detailed answer]

[Show brief answer]

Stampy is focused on answering common questions people have which are specifically about AI existential safety. More technical questions are also in our scope, though replying to all possible proposals is not feasible and this is not a great place to submit detailed ideas for evaluation.

We are interested in:

• Introductory questions closely related to the field e.g.
  • "How long will it be until transformative AI arrives?"
  • "Why might advanced AI harm humans?"
• Technical questions related to the field e.g.
  • "What is Cooperative Inverse Reinforcement Learning?"
  • "What is Logical Induction useful for?"
• Questions about how to contribute to the field e.g.
  • "Should I get a PhD?"
  • "Where can I find relevant job opportunities?"

More good examples can be found at canonical questions.

We do not aim to cover:

• Aspects of AI Safety or fairness which are not strongly relevant to existential safety e.g.
  • "How should self-driving cars weigh up moral dilemmas"
  • "How can we minimize the risk of privacy problems caused by machine learning algorithms?"
• Extremely specific and detailed questions the answering of which is unlikely to be of value to more than a single person e.g.
  • "What if we did <multiple paragraphs of dense text>? Would that result in safe AI?"

We will generally not delete out-of-scope content, but it will be reviewed as low priority to answer, not be marked as a canonical question, and not be served to readers by stampy.

What are the style guidelines for writing for Stampy?

Edit question

Edit answer

Try to avoid directly referencing the wording of the question in the answer, in order to make the answer more robust to alternate phrasings. For example, that question might be "Can we do X" and the reply is "Yes, if we can manage Y", but then the question might be "why can't we do X" or "What would happen if we tried to do X" so the answer should be like "We might be able to do X, if we can do Y", which works for all of those.