- There is AI safety in terms of producing "safe", politically correct outputs, no porn, etc.
- There is AI safety in terms of mass society/election manipulation.
- There is AI safety in terms of strong AI that kills us all a la Eliezer Yudkowsky.
I feel like these three have very little in common and it makes all debates less efficient.
"AI safety" imo should be the blanket term for "any harm done to society by the technology", and it's the responsibility of anyone using the term to clarify the usage.
If someone is trying to tell you to support/decry something because of "AI safety" they're tying to use the vagueness to take advantage of you.
If someone is trying to tell you that "ai safety people are dumb", they're trying to use the most extreme examples to change your opinion on the moderate cases, and are trying to take advantage of you.
Not always. I see AI safety used without further specification all the time even here on hacker news. I doubt the users are trying to take advantage of anyone.
In that case it's more of a case of the author considering one of those meanings so much more important/relevant that they think it's obvious what they mean. But often it's not – everyone fills in the meaning they care about the most.
But when you write a full article then the context is your article so you have to specify what you mean there, and the effort to specify it in an article is relatively little work compared to doing it in every comment.
It is pretty sad to read people bash together the efforts to understand and control the technology better and the companies doing their usual profit maximization.