Influencer comms for AI safety
Cascade is a nonprofit influencer comms agency that connects mainstream creators with AI safety orgs and small comms projects to educate the public on AI risks and safety priorities through event-anchored campaigns, private briefings and dinners, fully disclosed paid creator partnerships, and an independent comms fund for fast-turnaround campaigns.
With the advent of OAI-HF, agent swarms, and leading AI companies calling for a slowdown, there is an increasing need for high-quality, publicly accessible AI safety education. Our theory of impact is that mainstream creators can help more people understand advanced AI risks, make sense of important developments, and find meaningful ways to get involved. Wider public understanding and engagement can help make these risks harder for relevant institutions to overlook.
Creators are already a mainstream information source (with one in five U.S. adults turning to them for news), influencer advocacy shows evidence of increasing collective-response-efficacy beliefs and intentions to act, and creator advocacy campaigns are already translating reach into measurable action. We have a network of 40+ creators, including macro-influencers with 100k–1M+ followers who can help us do this before AGI arrives.
Our funding ask ranges from ~$10k for an immediate warning-shot campaign with a 1–2 week turnaround, to ~$156k for a three-month pilot, to ~$806k for a 12-month runway supporting 12 campaigns and 30+ additional creator projects.
Our long-term goal is a world where the risks of advanced AI are broadly understood and society can course-correct before catastrophic outcomes become irreversible.
Our working assumption is that course-correction becomes more likely when more people understand the risks and know how to engage with them, and that moments of mainstream attention create opportunities to develop that understanding. Public concern around AI is rapidly growing. That concern was initially focused on data centers and surveillance, but recent developments such as the Hugging Face incident and the public resignation of Jacob Coxon have brought issues that once felt confined to AI safety into mainstream conversation.
Creators are one way to turn that attention into understanding and action. Publicly disclosed advocacy campaigns already demonstrate this. Change.org explicitly paid for a creator-led campaign that generated 377,000+ verified signatures. Rapid-response campaigns like Social Currant’s, where a creator from its paid network made a video for the National Immigration Law Center that reached 3 million views and helped push a petition past 5,000 signatures within a week.
We plan to build relationships with creators, support them with resources, and brief them so they understand the risks of advanced AI well enough to produce content quickly when incidents or initiatives call for public awareness and action. This takes sizable effort in creator relations and coordination with experts. Some AI safety organizations already do this effectively in-house or have their own outreach campaigns, and more initiatives are being developed to push AI safety into the mainstream, including work with knowledge-focused creators through 80,000 Hours, Species, Control AI, and HitRecord; political influencers through QuitGPT; AI safety creators through programs like BlueDot Impact, and cohort-based programs like Frame, and PlzDontKillUs.
These programs are valuable, but the relationships and support built through these initiatives need to exist beyond individual programs and campaigns for this work to be useful in high-stakes, fast-turnaround moments.
Three needs remain:
In order to respond to an AI incident within a few days, it is necessary to have creators who are already familiar with AI safety or can be briefed quickly, existing relationships with them, access to relevant experts, production support, and immediate resources to achieve a fast turnaround. Cascade would maintain this capacity between campaigns rather than rebuilding it each time.
With the current discourse around paid AI safety advocacy, disclosure and vetting standards need to be improved and standardized, not worked out separately by different orgs (see Risks below). Some organizations already have this capacity in-house, but those that don't have to work out sourcing, vetting, briefing, disclosure, and measurement on their own, which takes substantial time and expertise.
If we want to build public trust around AI safety messaging, we need shared infrastructure for creator campaigns. Commercial brands faced a similar problem years ago and, after public backlash, the industry developed disclosure standards as well as standards around creator vetting, brand safety, suitability, and risk management, while paid partnerships and sponsorship disclosures have now become more normalized in public sentiment as part of creators having a platform.
Cascade can adapt those standards to AI safety comms, test them across campaigns, and publish them so that orgs have a standardized approach to work from.
Creators lose support between programs. Creators who want to continue working on AI safety may lose funding, expert access, and production support once a fellowship or campaign ends.
Cascade's goal is to provide that ongoing creator capacity, support organizations, creators and smaller projects in producing good work, maintain long-term relationships, and make it easier to move quickly and transparently when AI incidents occur.
We will do this through three main parts: