“notkilleveryoneism” sounds dumb

“AI safety” and “AI alignment” now often mean “making AI not say racist/​illegal/​etc things”. The term “AI notkilleveryoneism” is now sometimes being used as a replacement that refers specifically to ASI-related risks.

I think “notkilleveryoneism” is the wrong term to use, for reasons including:

  • The basic structure of simple words mashed together with a suffix is associated with fantasy, media for kids, and signalling lack of effort.

  • The “ism” suffix brings up associations to religions. You don’t want to say “we are the tribe of people whose thing is opposition to X”—you just want to say “we’re opposed to X”.

  • It’s awkward to say, not catchy.

  • There are broader concerns than AI literally killing everyone, and you probably want as big an alliance as possible.

What, then, might be better? Perhaps an analogy to biological or nuclear safety would be good, eg:

  • Stop AI Gain-of-Function Research

  • Stop AI Proliferation

Another angle is “enjoy the AI summer” framing. The ability of GPT-4 to fill out forms, the art generation by the various LoRA models...even just the ability to do good sentence embeddings and fast vector search—all these things will have big impacts in businesses, but it will take some time for people to figure out how to use them most effectively. You could say things like:

  • Enjoy the AI summer.

  • Taste the fruit before planting more.

Yet another angle is the “figure out how to distribute the gains equitably before moving on” and “AI power dynamics” framing. For example:

  • Stop (Chinese-style) AI surveillance.

  • Don’t let them make you obsolete. (like horses)

There are a number of possibilities, and I’m not proposing a single thing in particular, I’m just saying that people should use other phrases than “AI notkilleveryoneism”.

I thought of the following terms for technical discussion:

  • U-al = user-alignment

  • O-al = owner-alignment

  • S-al = society-alignment

  • H-al = humanity-alignment

  • I-al = intelligence-alignment

But for public-facing statements, such abbreviations are obviously unsuitable.