AI Safety Advocates Risk Losing the Anti-AI Crowd They Need

AI safety work — often called "alignment," meaning making AI do what humans actually want — used to be an inside job. Labs and governments decided the rules, and ordinary people barely noticed. That is changing. As AI rules move into lawmaking, public opinion now matters. The essay argues that safety advocates can no longer ignore what the public thinks, because voters can speed up their goals or block them entirely.

Early warning signs are already visible online. The author points to r/BetterOffline, an anti-Big-Tech Reddit community with about 52,000 subscribers and 198,000 weekly visitors. There, many users insist today's AI is not very capable, so dramatic warnings about AI risk look like corporate marketing. Some even attacked Senator Bernie Sanders for supporting work on AI misalignment risk, despite his support for AI regulation generally. In other words, being anti-AI does not mean being pro-safety.

The trap the author describes is alliance-building on weak foundations. If safety groups team up with anti-AI campaigners purely for short-term political convenience, those partnerships can flip. A partner that turns hostile can stall funding, kill legislation, and set safety efforts back years — exactly the outcome both sides say they want to avoid. The fix, the essay suggests, is more research into what anti-AI groups actually believe, and more honest outreach rather than assumed friendship.

The catch: this is one author's analysis, not a poll. The evidence comes from web scraping of online comments, which are loud, self-selected, and not representative of the wider public. The author also notes they support existing outreach organizations and are offering predictions, not proof. Treat this as a heads-up about a political risk worth watching, rather than a settled finding about how voters will behave.