Link to original article

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Wikipedia as an introduction to the alignment problem, published by SoerenMind on May 29, 2023 on The AI Alignment Forum.
AI researchers and others are increasingly looking for an introduction to the alignment problem that is clearly written, credible, and supported by evidence and real examples. The Wikipedia article on AI Alignment has become such an introduction.
Link:
Aside from me, it is written by Mantas Mazeika and Gavin Leech (who are great technical writers), other Wikipedia contributors, and copy editor Amber Ace. It also had extensive feedback from this community.
In the last month, it had ~20k unique readers and was cited by Yoshua Bengio.
We've tried hard to keep the article accessible for non-technical readers while also making sense to AI researchers.
I think Wikipedia is a good format to introduce many readers to the alignment problem because it can include videos and illustrations (unlike papers) and it is more credible than blog posts. However, Wikipedia has strict rules and could be changed by anyone.
Note that we've announced this effort on the Wikipedia talk page and shared public drafts to let other editors give feedback and contribute.
I you edit the article, please keep in mind Wikipedia's rules, use reliable sources, and consider that we've worked hard to keep it concise because most Wikipedia readers spend <1 minute on the page. For the latter goal, it's best to focus on edits that reduce or don't increase length. To give feedback, feel free to post on the talk page or message me.
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