Guy

**Main points in favor of this grant**

• I think that the AI safety movement could benefit from stronger messaging in popular culture; a comedy musical seems a great addition! The dark subject matter around AI extinction has pretty low mass appeal, but dark comedies can be very popular.
• I found the play hilarious and incisive. The ficitonal AI lab staff were charicatures of very real personalities and movements currently involved in the AI race. The musical elements were clever and well-delivered. I had a blast! I want to incentivise more high-quality, socially impactful art regarding the AGI race.
• I don’t expect Open Phil or SFF to start funding plays anytime soon, so I expect my regrant is quite counterfactual.

**Donor's main reservations**

• On priors, it seems unlikely that this play will take off internationally, even if it is successful in Berlin. If the play is only of interest to a niche EA audience, this might be low impact. I encourage the producers to screen the play to a non-EA audience, survey them, and perhaps make modifications to increase mass appeal.
• My regrant could have funded an AI safety researcher for ~3 weeks FTE. It’s hard to judge whether the play’s impact will stack up compared to this. In the end, I made a judgement based on the relative abundance of funding for AI safety researchers post-Open Phil RFPs.

**Process for deciding amount**

I decided to regrant $6.4k, which was twice the amount raised so far based on exchange rates at the time I made the grant. This amount was chosen to be high enough to significantly contribute to the play going ahead, while being low enough to encourage further crowdfunding. Also, I made a heuristic comparison against similar grants I’ve made.

**Conflicts of interest**

I have no conflicts of interest to declare.