Next Steps After Attending A Workshop
If you've just attended a workshop, enjoyed the experience, and you're wondering what your next steps should be, this is the page for you! We have several different follow-up strategies for people who have attended our technical workshops, which differ based on individuals' own interests.
Quick Follow-ups
- CivAI Demo Access: Want access to the CivAI demo (the LinkedIn phishing and voice cloning demo) to show to others? Go to CivAI's site and ask to get access! Feel free to mention that you were at an AI Safety Awareness Foundation workshop and saw it.
- Workshop Slides: Want to see the slides we used for the intro talk? Those are available here.
Understand What AI Future You Want
More than anything, the point of these workshops is to give participants a chance to think deeply about what is going on with AI and what is around the corner so that they can form an opinion about what kind of future they want.
After all, if AI is going to affect everyone, then everyone should have a voice, and the prerequisite to having a voice is having an opinion, and the prerequisite to having an opinion is knowing what's going on.
Action: Think for an hour or so at home about what kind of AI future you want. Consider both the things that excite you as well as the things that concern you. We highly recommend writing this down—even if your opinions change over time, this exercise can be highly useful as a starting point.
Contact Your Local Legislator
Contacting your local legislator can sound scary, but it's actually not difficult at all! Whether it's your state legislators or your federal legislators, giving them a quick call and asking to speak with either their staff or the legislators themselves is quite easy to do.
You don't have to come with any sort of pre-planned policy agenda. Just letting them know that AI governance and AI safety is important to you is a fantastic first step. Legislative offices keep tallies of how many constituents are calling in about particular issues, so just expressing interest in the field itself is already very useful.
Join Your Local AI Safety Club
Connect with like-minded individuals in your area who are also interested in AI safety and governance. Local clubs provide ongoing discussion, learning opportunities, and community support for staying engaged with these important topics.
On-ramping to a Career in Technical AI Safety
This section is for those contemplating a career shift into more technical AI safety work. If you didn't get a chance to cover all the topics you wanted to at our technical workshop, please come to another AISAF workshop! We have our workshop schedule on our website here.
Career Advice Organizations
Upskilling Programs
- BlueDot Impact Alignment Course12 week online course, part-time, breadth over depth
- ARENA5 week program, full-time, focused on mechanistic interpretability and LLM evaluations. Quite selective and intense.
- MATS10 week program, full-time, pairing people with senior AI safety researchers. Very prestigious with high bar for entry.
- SPAR3 month program, usually part-time, pairing people with mentors. Often viewed as "MATS-lite".
- AI Safety CampUmbrella for many individual projects, usually part-time commitment.
AI Safety Organizations
- METR: Model Evaluation and Threat Research
- Apollo Research: Mechanistic interpretability and evaluations
- Anthropic's AI Safety Team: Technical and policy research
AI Policy and Governance
To understand more about AI policy and governance, first off we have a legislation-focused workshop that we'd be happy to see you at! For more details please see our website here.
Policy Resources
- Blue Dot Impact Governance Course12 week online course, part-time, breadth over depth
- Center for AI Policy (CAIP): Non-partisan organization working directly with legislators in D.C.
- CivAI: Outreach to civic organizations (we used their demo!)
Help Run a Workshop
As we continue to run more workshops in more places and for more audiences, we are always looking for volunteers to help teach materials and potentially even run workshops on their own!
We appreciate the help, but we also have found that often teaching others is a great way to learn for oneself. This also lets you be a part of the process in deciding what materials we'll use in our workshops.
For more information, please reach out to us directly at: info@aisafetyawarenessfoundation.org
We can give you a rundown of what workshops we're planning over the coming weeks and months. We move quickly so new workshops are often getting scheduled weekly.